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Endarire
2015-05-21, 06:17 PM
Yes, sixth edition.

Greetings, all!

D&D has experienced its roots (1E), its tremendous expansion of settings and rules (2E), its standardized structure with plenty of room for creativity and modularity (3.x, Pathfinder), its attempt to mimic WoW (4E), and now a reboot of 2E/3E with simpler, better tested, and more intuitive mechanics (5E).

Having played 5E, I don't see anything that obviously needs a major fix in a new edition, and, from what I've heard (http://www.nerdsonearth.com/2014/12/dungeons-dragons-5e-release-schedule-2018/), WotC has no announced plans to release more pure rulebooks - just adventures and patches.

While 5E may be the last official edition of D&D (and I doubt it, because of how profitable D&D is, and, y'know, it's D&D), what do you think will be core features of 6E? At present, I don't know.

Wartex1
2015-05-21, 06:28 PM
If there is a true 6th Edition, I don't have any idea what it would fix. I mean, the only thing that 5th edition is missing is extremely high-power gameplay and more combat complexity. Both could easily be done in patches and supplements, but I don't really see those as flaws at all. 5E is elegant in its simplicity, with only a few things needing fixing like the Beastmaster.

JAL_1138
2015-05-21, 06:32 PM
Tangent: 2e arguably didn't get much more in the way of rules in its core; combat got somewhat simpler than 1e due to streamlining initiative and surprise while removing segments. Did get a bucketload more splats later, though. Its page count was much higher due more to writing style and duplicating some information between PHB and DMG, as well as (I think) quite a bit more spells.

I would say we'll get a 5.5 before we get a 6e. 5e is quite good--I personally favor 2e but I quite enjoy 5e--but it does have several poorly-written spells, class features, and feats, and one fairly poorly-designed (or at least nonsensically designed) subclass (Beastmaster). All of these are pretty clear candidates for errata, and it's likely that eventually it'll all be collected and worked into a Revised Version.

6e could go back to 4e levels of boardgaminess, or it could swing toward being even less crunchy and more Theater-of-the-Mind friendly than 5e is (with rough ballparks like "close range" or "long range" instead of 5' increments on measurement).

Hiro Protagonest
2015-05-21, 06:35 PM
its attempt to mimic WoW (4E)

:smallannoyed:

Grinner
2015-05-21, 06:45 PM
Having played 5E, I don't see anything that obviously needs a major fix in a new edition...

Just give it a little more time. I'm sure we'll come up with something eventually.

Mando Knight
2015-05-21, 06:56 PM
:smallannoyed:

It was, as much as 3rd was an attempt to copy Diablo and 5th was obvious pandering to the people who left D&D for Pathfinder and other retro-clone style systems.

Bard1cKnowledge
2015-05-21, 07:20 PM
make goblin a race maybe add two more classes, like a summoner or another ranged melee combatant

woodlandkammao
2015-05-21, 11:13 PM
A damn crafting system

goto124
2015-05-22, 12:08 AM
A damn crafting system

I read that as a Damned crafting system. As in, a crafting system for demons, devils, and other Infernal beings.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 12:22 AM
It was, as much as 3rd was an attempt to copy Diablo and 5th was obvious pandering to the people who left D&D for Pathfinder and other retro-clone style systems.

So, may I ask for the similarities between 4e and WoW? Does 4e feature massive multiplayer, grinding, PvP battlegrounds and arenas, a tool to find strangers that form a group to clear a dungeon, bosses that require groups of 10,20,25 or 40 players, travel via flying mounds, aggro tables and ranges for monsters, "kill a bunch of orcs and bring me their heads"-quests where only every other orc will have a lootable head, a focus on content for level-capped characters, starting areas for each race, two opposing factions to divide the playerbase, abilities that recharge during combat every X turns, repeatable daily content, regular raises to the level cap via splats that obsolete previous content, a crafting system with leveled professions, or any of the features typically found in WoW-clone MMORPGs?

What's that you say? No to all of these, but there are specialized roles like defenders which don't work like tanks work in WoW, leaders which don't work like healers do in WoW and were in the game since day one, controllers which don't exist in WoW and strikers which also exist in every rpg ever made? Yeah, that totally emulates WoW, it's like I'm back in my old raiding guild.

BWR
2015-05-22, 12:53 AM
So, may I ask for the similarities between 4e and WoW? Does 4e feature massive multiplayer, grinding, PvP battlegrounds and arenas, a tool to find strangers that form a group to clear a dungeon, bosses that require groups of 10,20,25 or 40 players, travel via flying mounds, aggro tables and ranges for monsters, "kill a bunch of orcs and bring me their heads"-quests where only every other orc will have a lootable head, a focus on content for level-capped characters, starting areas for each race, two opposing factions to divide the playerbase, abilities that recharge during combat every X turns, repeatable daily content, regular raises to the level cap via splats that obsolete previous content, a crafting system with leveled professions, or any of the features typically found in WoW-clone MMORPGs?

What's that you say? No to all of these, but there are specialized roles like defenders which don't work like tanks work in WoW, leaders which don't work like healers do in WoW and were in the game since day one, controllers which don't exist in WoW and strikers which also exist in every rpg ever made? Yeah, that totally emulates WoW, it's like I'm back in my old raiding guild.

The feeling that 4e was a WoW was mostly due to the at-will/encounter/daily power use which is far more reminiscient of MMOs in general than the traditional combat and Vancian casting from previous editions. Classes were also designed with combat roles in mind rather than fantasy literature archetypes (another MMO element) and there was far less variation in classes (again, more MMO than earlier D&D) since they all basically worked the same way, and everything was made to be balanced against each other from the get go rather than accepting that some classes were better than others (more MMO mind-set than previous D&D editions). So yeah, it's a lot closer to an MMO than a lot of us like.
Oh, and it royally messed up thirty odd years of stuff (FR, elves-eladrin, etc.) removing it even more from earlier D&D.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 06:01 AM
The A/E/U system is nothing like having abilities with cooldowns outside of rare cases where abilities habe 10 minute cooldowns used during fights that don't last longer than that. There are no rotations and priority-systems are obly hinted at through abilities like hunter's quarry or warlock's curse.

While the combat abilities of classes were designed with combat roles in mid, this is not new to 4th edition. Groups without a character with the ability to heal are very much discouraged and the cleric, being the go-to class for many groups, was initially added to DnD not due to inspiration through literature (of which there is effectively none), but because the game was supposed to have a counterpart to the Vampire class, which exists in 4e together with dozens of others which did occured in previous editions and are common archetypes in fantasy literature. Roles were also far from strict in 4e and neitjer are they in MMOs, WoW classes have access to 1-4 specs that fill 1-4 roles and classes in a game like Rift are even more flexible than that.

"Classes were balanced" is also not a bad thing, not something you typically find in MMOs and something that definitely didn't happen in 4E. Similar things can be said about "they worked the same".

"Messing up existing lore" has also nothig to do with "ferling like a MMO".

As for the OP, I honestly don't see a place for DnD to go at all, I think it's a relic of the past that primarily stays alive through nostalgia rather than quality (altough having sucky competitors helps), ironically very much like a certain MMO.

Cluedrew
2015-05-22, 07:10 AM
I think as long as people love the game, there will always be a sequel/new edition.

What's left? They may try something crazy (but then with what happened with 4th, that might not happen for a while), more likely it will be a rebalance with more and more fine tuning. Trying to get the classes balanced, easy to use and yet all unique and interesting. They will never get all of those things (not perfectly at least) but I expect them to try given their track record.

Hawkstar
2015-05-22, 07:14 AM
I think D&D 6e, if there is one, will be a reiteration of D&D, taking and reinterpreting the rules in light of how the game changes and adapts from the new ruleset.

When D&D 3e was written, it was expected to play similar to AD&D. 4e was a reaction to accomodate the way 3e was played. And 5e was a reaction to try to go 'back' to older-school D&D.

I, for one, am hoping the Will/Fort/Reflex save system gets replaced with some sort of "Save Vs. X" again, because "Make a Save Vs. Exposition" is funnier and less wordy than "Will Save to Resist Exposition."

Ashtagon
2015-05-22, 07:20 AM
D&D has experienced its roots (1E), its tremendous expansion of settings and rules (2E), its standardized structure with plenty of room for creativity and modularity (3.x, Pathfinder), its attempt to mimic WoW (4E), and now a reboot of 2E/3E with simpler, better tested, and more intuitive mechanics (5E).

It's more like...

0th edition (the white box): roots
1st edition: setting expansion
2nd edition: lawyers' coup against Gygax (seriously, the whole point of 2e was to get his name off the book covers)
3rd edition: standardisation and modularity
4th edition: Gainaxed
5th edition: reboot

Psyren
2015-05-22, 07:24 AM
Controllers do exist in WoW, and there was a time in the past when you needed that role filled to survive a dungeon. Then they nerfed it so that you only needed that for heroics+, and then nerfed it further so that you only needed it for raids (and proper raids at that, not LFR.) This has led to the unfortunate/unintended scenario where entire swaths of players make it to maximum level without have any clue how to use their class' entire toolkit.

WoW informing 4e's design is not an insult to 4e, any more than Diablo's influence on 3e was an insult there. At the end of the day they're a business, and keeping up with trends is how businesses survive.

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-22, 07:30 AM
Speaking as a person who all but ignored 4th edition and only has passing interest in the 5th, I feel the question is more than a bit pointless to ask at this point. Nevermind that 5th Ed only just go out, Pathfinder and OSR would've filled (and to extent, do fill) the niches of D&D-like gaming even in its absence. What 5th Ed has going for it at this point is mostly brand name and an air of officiality. I think we could easily go 10, even 20 years before a new version of D&D is in the slightest bit required.

Hawkstar
2015-05-22, 07:32 AM
What 5th Ed has going for it at this point is mostly brand name and an air of officiality.And ease of play, and a blend of old-school and contemporary feel, and...

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-22, 07:35 AM
And ease of play, and a blend of old-school and contemporary feel, and...

Compared to 3rd and 4th editions, maybe.

Compared to a lot of OSR products? Hah.

Milo v3
2015-05-22, 08:30 AM
Maybe something like 5e, but where you can do different playstyles rather than just lower scale power. I doubt they'd go back to the giant amounts of crunch of previous editions immediately.


5th was obvious pandering to the people who left D&D for Pathfinder.

Actually it seems like the opossite. I mean... pathfinder is super rules everywhere crunchy-ness. :smallconfused:

Psyren
2015-05-22, 08:32 AM
While 5e is not my personal cup of tea, it is very robust and a great mainstream rules-light product. There's just enough complexity to make it interesting while not being off-putting to DMs without the kind of encyclopedic memory needed for a fast rules-heavy experience. Anyone who felt looking things up or tracking multiple conditions in 3.5 was burdensome will not be any more satisfied with PF, but 5e will scratch that itch quite well. Bounded accuracy and the advantage/disadvantage mechanics, for all my issues with them, are ultimately much more streamlined ways to handle conflict resolution than anything previous editions provided, including 4e.

I could personally see myself playing 5e if my IRL friends insisted on it (thankfully they are still as fond of PF as I am, at least for now) and enjoying it. I still prefer rules-heavy because my brain is wired for it, but 5e has just enough variety in its crunch to keep me interested.

My issue with rules-light games is that there's no real room for them to grow. It's all in our imaginations/"theater of the mind," and that arena has stayed pretty much constant over the decades. Rules-heavy meanwhile will only get better as technology improves, because more and more you can use computers and platforms like roll20 to aid you with tracking all the nuts and bolts that rules-heavy games provide. By clearly defining things like how lightning and vision, cover and concealment, altitude and leverage etc. work, you make those things easier to standardize and thus to program.



Actually it seems like the opossite. I mean... pathfinder is super rules everywhere crunchy-ness. :smallconfused:

That. 5e was aimed at (I dislike the pejorative term "pandering") folks who either didn't like Pathfinder, or who only turned to it out of desperation because they didn't like 4e and 3.5 was out of print/not being updated. I think targeting that segment was the smartest thing WotC has done in a long while.

Amphetryon
2015-05-22, 09:02 AM
Speaking as a person who all but ignored 4th edition and only has passing interest in the 5th, I feel the question is more than a bit pointless to ask at this point. Nevermind that 5th Ed only just go out, Pathfinder and OSR would've filled (and to extent, do fill) the niches of D&D-like gaming even in its absence. What 5th Ed has going for it at this point is mostly brand name and an air of officiality. I think we could easily go 10, even 20 years before a new version of D&D is in the slightest bit required.

Required? What does 'required' mean in regards to the release of a new version of a game, exactly? 2e wasn't required; 3e wasn't required. . . heck, the version generally called 1e wasn't required. There was no requirement that the game progress beyond Chainmail.

Flickerdart
2015-05-22, 09:21 AM
There will be a new edition of D&D for the same reason there will be more of everything any business puts out - growth. WotC knows they need to do better than just "recapture the people that jumped ship with 3rd and 4th edition" so 6th will come out as a response to whatever they perceive the next demographic they want to capture likes.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-22, 09:26 AM
3.5 and earlier editions are kind of like Street Fighter 2; they were deeply flawed in the sense that a lot of design decisions in them resulted in accidental consequences, or "exploits," (combos weren't originally intended to be a thing in Street Fighter 2). Earlier DnD also didn't adhere really tightly to game design philosophies that would today be considered sort of standard and objectively good. However, both games ended up popular because those accidental consequences and design "failures" ended up opening a lot of room for player creativity and raising the skill ceiling.

4e, on the other hand, is a very tightly designed game. Everything in it is pretty clearly and obviously purposive: each spell does exactly this effect in order to make players feel like their class when they use it, each power boost you unlock has exactly some amount of benefit that is countered exactly by the monster level formula, each feat and perk is mathematically made as close to the others as possible, and so on. Sure, there are flaws here and there with some options, but by and large it meant 4e games had more competing options to choose from, had more instances of decision-making, had more tolerance for skilled and unskilled players in the same game, and all that good stuff. This made a game that was fun on its own, but kind of unrecognizable to earlier DnD players, because 3.5 players have learned to see evidence of that skill ceiling where you can take a spell and crack most encounters wide open whereas 4e players see it where you get many options of similar virtue that you have to pick between. Then, 3.5 players see variety in different resource systems (I've never understood why folks have gotten attached to this as a major virtue of 3.5, it seems quite pointless to me) while 4e players see variety in different viable options.

So 5e being philosophically more like 3.5 probably indicates that the Dungeons and Dragons brand is done with 4e's philosophy for good. If 6th, 7th, 8th editions ever come out, they will probably be significantly less different from previous editions than 4e was from 3.5. This is kind of a shame, in my opinion, because 4e did what it did extremely well, and in the realm of RPG's, there are few developers large enough to make a project resembling 4e.

Aside: Anyone who thinks 4e copied WoW either hasn't read 4e or hasn't played WoW.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 10:29 AM
Aside: Anyone who thinks 4e copied WoW either hasn't read 4e or hasn't played WoW.

I've done both, and while I think "copied" might be a bit strong, the influence of the MMO surge that was taking place during 4e's design is undeniable.


Required? What does 'required' mean in regards to the release of a new version of a game, exactly? 2e wasn't required; 3e wasn't required. . . heck, the version generally called 1e wasn't required. There was no requirement that the game progress beyond Chainmail.

New editions are required. Without 2e, 3e and 4e to keep things fresh and experiment, D&D - and with it, perhaps the entire hobby - wouldn't have had the exposure needed to garner mainstream attention or been able to attract the talent it needed to iterate on the formula. We wouldn't be able to afford dedicated designers or developers who can write and playtest rules as full-time jobs, and wouldn't have been able to afford the most talented artists, mathematicians and wordsmiths that benefit new and old players alike. The industry as a whole would have suffered.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 10:53 AM
Controllers do exist in WoW, and there was a time in the past when you needed that role filled to survive a dungeon.

The existence of control abilities is not the same as the existence of a dedicated controller spec. So no, the role "controller" does not exist and has never existed in WoW.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-22, 10:55 AM
Well if you want to switch the word to "influence," sure. A lot of stuff is influenced by a lot of other stuff. What I'm finding silly is people saying stuff like "its attempt to mimic WoW," and "4e was a WoW."

Tengu_temp
2015-05-22, 10:57 AM
attempt to mimic WoW (4E)

Woosh, there goes all attempt at keeping this a neutral discussion.

Considering that since Essentials, every DND product panders more and more to oldschool grognards, I won't be surprised if 6e will have Elf as a class and -4 strength for female characters.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 11:00 AM
The existence of control abilities is not the same as the existence of a dedicated controller spec. So no, the role "controller" does not exist and has never existed in WoW.

You're wrong - it was a dedicated role you needed in the party at one time. I remember the days when DPS shamans, paladins and warlocks had trouble getting groups because they didn't have any control abilities back then (spells like Hex didn't exist yet) and non-Paladin tanks had difficulty maintaining aggro on more than two mobs.

The fact that those controllers could DPS when their control wasn't needed is irrelevant, because they can do that in 4e too.


Considering that since Essentials, every DND product panders more and more to oldschool grognards, I won't be surprised if 6e will have Elf as a class and -4 strength for female characters.

As amusing as this would be, about the only way this could work would be as some kind of ploy to make 5e even more popular.

Tengu_temp
2015-05-22, 11:03 AM
Show of hands - is there anyone who compares DND 4e to WoW and doesn't mean it in a derogatory way? Be honest.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-22, 11:04 AM
Woosh, there goes all attempt at keeping this a neutral discussion.

Considering that since Essentials, every DND product panders more and more to oldschool grognards, I won't be surprised if 6e will have Elf as a class and -4 strength for female characters.

If WOTC just wanted to pander to grognards, wouldn't the best way be to just start printing old editions again?

Tengu_temp
2015-05-22, 11:08 AM
That sounds like a bad business decision to me. New players won't buy reprints because they're not new, and old players won't buy them because they already own these books.

JAL_1138
2015-05-22, 11:20 AM
If WOTC just wanted to pander to grognards, wouldn't the best way be to just start printing old editions again?

They did, for a couple limited runs. The greencover reprints of the '95 "Revised" printing of 2e (AKA "black-border," which was pretty much just collected errata, of which there was not a vast amount, and reorganized into two columns instead of three per page and with different art) are quite nice, although sadly the semi-gloss covers they used get fingerprints really badly.

New players wanting to play an older edition, or old players who no longer have the books, only ever had borrowed books to play with back in ye olde days, or whose books are falling apart (TSR did not use great-quality binding or especially-durable covers) will buy them.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 11:27 AM
If WOTC just wanted to pander to grognards, wouldn't the best way be to just start printing old editions again?

What they're trying to do - and which I think succeeded at to a degree - was to mix the good parts of old and new design principles. But catering to both audiences meant abstracting the rules more and that's where they lost me personally.


Show of hands - is there anyone who compares DND 4e to WoW and doesn't mean it in a derogatory way? Be honest.

What if there are both positive and negative aspects to the comparison? Can I raise my hand then?

Amphetryon
2015-05-22, 11:34 AM
Show of hands - is there anyone who compares DND 4e to WoW and doesn't mean it in a derogatory way? Be honest.

*Raises hand* The use of a shorthand comparison between two things in which one may note some similarities - superficial or not - makes descriptions easier when talking to someone only familiar with one of the two things. It is not automatically derogatory. If it were, then any description of a plot or story arc that compares it to another plot, story arc, or trope, would automatically be derogatory, which would mean that Creative Writing ceases to be a thing of any value or interest.

Flickerdart
2015-05-22, 11:37 AM
Considering that since Essentials, every DND product panders more and more to oldschool grognards, I won't be surprised if 6e will have Elf as a class and -4 strength for female characters.
The modern fantasy gaming paradigm is "race and class." D&D helped create this, and breaking away from it would be foolish and highly unlikely when WotC's goal is "make the best D&D."

This is another reason there will be a 6E: people's expectations of what a fantasy game lets them do are going to change, and D&D needs to adapt to that. In the same way that Street Fighter 2 made combos standard in fighting games, 5E might cough up something that everyone loves, and then 6E will have to bake it into the system in an intentional way. Or more likely, pressure from competing and related products (video games, movies and books, maybe even Broadway musicals) will produce players that expect to be able to build certain characters and play them in certain ways, and WotC will need to create a new edition that considers the needs of these new players against the needs of the old ones.

Seerow
2015-05-22, 11:44 AM
Show of hands - is there anyone who compares DND 4e to WoW and doesn't mean it in a derogatory way? Be honest.

Nobody at all.

Anyone who actually enjoys WoW recognizes there is almost no similarity between 4e and WoW. Anyone who doesn't like WoW associated 4e with WoW because they are two things they dislike, not because of any actual similarities.

Seriously, the 3e Binder (with its multiple vestiges each with a 4 round cooldown ability) is far more like an MMO based class than anything ever published in 4e. And I don't consider that a bad thing. I think tabletops could actually stand to learn a lot from MMO and other modern RPG design, rather than spinning their wheels and going back to designs that failed 20 years ago.

Morty
2015-05-22, 12:04 PM
Nobody at all.

Anyone who actually enjoys WoW recognizes there is almost no similarity between 4e and WoW. Anyone who doesn't like WoW associated 4e with WoW because they are two things they dislike, not because of any actual similarities.

Seriously, the 3e Binder (with its multiple vestiges each with a 4 round cooldown ability) is far more like an MMO based class than anything ever published in 4e. And I don't consider that a bad thing. I think tabletops could actually stand to learn a lot from MMO and other modern RPG design, rather than spinning their wheels and going back to designs that failed 20 years ago.

Yeah. And it that vein, there's a lot a sixth edition could do to modernize D&D. But WotC won't do it, because people who want modern RPG design aren't their potential customers anyway.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 12:14 PM
You're wrong - it was a dedicated role you needed in the party at one time. I remember the days when DPS shamans, paladins and warlocks had trouble getting groups because they didn't have any control abilities back then (spells like Hex didn't exist yet) and non-Paladin tanks had difficulty maintaining aggro on more than two mobs.

The fact that those controllers could DPS when their control wasn't needed is irrelevant, because they can do that in 4e too.


And your comment about warlocks shows you much you know. I played one myself and I very distinctly remember using Fear to CC one target, while doing dps on that target and whatever wasn't being crowd controlled. And in dungeons with elemental mobs I would CC a second mob with banish and if there were demons, like the satyrs in Dire Maul east, I would fear one, banish a second one and enslave a third one, as I was dpsing. And if there was a mage in the group, the mage would polymorph one target and dps the ones that weren't being crowd controlled, if there was a rogue, the rogue would sap a target and dps the ones that weren't being crowd controlled and if there was a hunter, the hunter would freeze a target with frost trap and dps the ones that weren't being crowd controlled.

And "could DPS when their control wasn't needed"? CC effects needed to be coordinated and regularly reapplied, but you had more than enough room to dps. Sap lasted 45 seconds, polymorph lasted at least 20 seconds (can't remember how long it did at level 60 or 70), Freezing Trap lasted 20 seconds, Fear lasted 20 seconds, banish lasted 30 seconds, Enslave Demon lasted up to 5 minutes and they could each only affect one target at a time (except maybe Freezing Trap?), what do you think controllers were doing between in these time intervals, pick their noses?

AND EVEN IF someone in a 5 man group was a dedicated controller, each spec was tank/heal/ranged dps/melee dps, there was no controller spec.

So no, you are wrong, period.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 12:28 PM
And your comment about warlocks shows you much you know. I played one myself and I very distinctly remember using Fear to CC one target, while doing dps on that target and whatever wasn't being crowd controlled.

Err - this shows how much you know. Fear in dungeons would get you almost immediately kicked back in the classic and BC days, because it would invariably bring back far more mobs than the pack you were trying to pull and cause a wipe. Gnomeragan, Zul'farrak, Sunken Temple, Ramps - even the outdoor elite areas like Stonewatch were strictly no-fear zones, and walking into the latter three instances without a cc class or paladin tank meant clearing the dungeon was basically down to a coin flip or being overgeared.

So no, you are wrong, period.

kieza
2015-05-22, 12:37 PM
What I'd LIKE to see, although I'm not sure I ever will, is an edition which has a tightly-balanced core with simple mechanics, in the vein of 4th edition with better math...and then breaks that mold with a bunch of optional supplements so that groups can tailor the game to their tastes.

Want Vancian casting? Here's The Book of Vance, a supplement with rules for how that works.
Want powerful magic and save-or-die spells? Here's The Tome of Mordenkainen, a supplement with lots of potent spells.
Want mundane characters who can run on air and break mountains? Here's The Book of Ten Swords, a supplement that makes mundanes not so mundane.

But these books should clearly say, on the back or in the introduction, "This book contains material which not all players may appreciate, for reasons X, Y, and Z. Ask your group before introducing it to the campaign."

And at the same time, run a Core line of books that remain tightly balanced, as a base to build on with these supplements.

I'd also like to see more of a focus on adventures, modules, and campaign settings, instead of burning through the design space with a PHB every year. This would be ESPECIALLY great if the adventures and modules came with appendices that had a handful of interesting options--things like magic items that fit the theme of the adventure, or feats and powers that allow you to replicate (or counter) cool things that the monsters in the adventure do.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 12:39 PM
Err - this shows how much you know. Fear in dungeons would get you almost immediately kicked back in the classic and BC days, because it would invariably bring back far more mobs than the pack you were trying to pull and cause a wipe. Gnomeragan, Zul'farrak, Sunken Temple, Ramps - even the outdoor elite areas like Stonewatch were strictly no-fear zones, and walking into the latter three instances without a cc class or paladin tank meant clearing the dungeon was basically down to a coin flip or being overgeared.

So no, you are wrong, period.

Except you could kite trash packs back a few meters and be fine. I literally played a warlock myself, you can't tell me I didn't do that, because I did. Yes, there were points where I using fear would have been dangerous and I didn't do it, but the far more problematic dungeons for me were Scholomance and eastern Stratholme because undeads were immune to Fear.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-22, 12:44 PM
I actually seem to remember that Paladins weren't really viable as tanks until BC rolled around. I've been a warrior main from release to right before WOTLK, and always remembered the class being considered the most balanced and best tank if played well, though a lot of warriors over-threat on one target and don't properly stance-dance, so they fail to hold as many mobs as they actually could. Paladin tanks in BC can put out some crazy DPS, though.

Anyways, I think you've both proven that you've played WoW at some point.

C-Dude
2015-05-22, 12:51 PM
Levels! Levels for everything!

I want my short sword to take a few levels in axe so that I can use axe-only abilities with it. Also, my dwarf has been meaning to take a few levels in elf to improve his connection with nature.

...I'm kidding.

But seriously, I think that backgrounds were a step in the right direction and I feel like 'commoner' levels would be a logical next step. Something that always bothered me about D&D (not just 5e) was that your adventurers were dropped into the world at level 1 when clearly they would have needed to have a life before they started killing monsters. Having a few levels of 'carpenter' or 'tailor' might be a more enticing exploration of the background mechanic, and giving the species/races levels instead of static bonuses would let players individually decide how much their physical identity defines their character. Hey, maybe between chronicles characters would accrue these skill/junk levels when they return to their mundane lives.

Amphetryon
2015-05-22, 12:51 PM
Nobody at all.

Anyone who actually enjoys WoW recognizes there is almost no similarity between 4e and WoW. Anyone who doesn't like WoW associated 4e with WoW because they are two things they dislike, not because of any actual similarities.

Seriously, the 3e Binder (with its multiple vestiges each with a 4 round cooldown ability) is far more like an MMO based class than anything ever published in 4e. And I don't consider that a bad thing. I think tabletops could actually stand to learn a lot from MMO and other modern RPG design, rather than spinning their wheels and going back to designs that failed 20 years ago.

Apparently I am nobody, as are three other folks with whom I've gamed. Nifty.

JAL_1138
2015-05-22, 12:58 PM
If we're talking about what we'd like to see, I'd like to see one which was geared entirely toward TotM, fairly light on the crunch, but still with a combat section written by someone who had at least a basic knowledge of real-world weapon use and mediæval/renaissance combat manuals, removed the disassociated mechanics of rest-based recharges for non-magical abilities (because if you're not "too tired" swing a greatclub the size of a tree for three hours straight, you're not "too tired" to yell "hey, look out!" to a party member unless you stop and rest for a while), placed heavy restrictions on spellcasting (good ol' casting init modifier, Spell Failure Chance, Int limits, and chance to fail to learn a spell), vastly limited healing and resurrection, incorporated Vitality/Wounds instead of HP (the only good thing to come out of d20), low numbers in the vein of older editions, a broad skill system which allowed for better modeling of expert-versus-untrained-yokel without getting into the 3.5 problem of ludicrously high DCs and bonuses, and which allowed for easy incorporation of monster races (including non-humanoid, because what the heck) as PCs or NPCs. And which had a decent grasp of basic economics and pre-industrial toolmaking (weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, etc) and construction baked into its crafting system.

mephnick
2015-05-22, 03:11 PM
The idea of at will and encounter powers and combat roles were obviously influenced by MMO gameplay and the huge market for that kind of theme that existed in the 00's. {scrubbed}

To the topic at hand, I'm not sure how you would evolve the game for 6th edition, unless you went completely rules-lite to push into the market of the Dungeon Worlds of today, but then it might not be considered D&D. Of course, games that come out in the future could easily change the RPG market, which would influence future D&D products. 5e isn't just lighter on rules for the sake of change, it's pretty easy to see the RPG market is heading that way and I'm not sure it's ever coming back.

Hawkstar
2015-05-22, 03:34 PM
6e could go back to 4e levels of boardgaminess, or it could swing toward being even less crunchy and more Theater-of-the-Mind friendly than 5e is (with rough ballparks like "close range" or "long range" instead of 5' increments on measurement).
Oh god I hope not. The "Mental Venn Diagram" combat of 13th Age is my least favorite part of the system, because it makes everything a blurry mess. Worst of all Fireball doesn't feel like a Fireball anymore (It doesn't help that it completely gimped the range and radius.)
The idea of at will and encounter powers and combat roles were obviously influenced by MMO gameplay and the huge market for that kind of theme that existed in the 00's. {scrubbed}I was not aware that D&D 3.5 was an MMO.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 03:35 PM
The idea of at will and encounter powers and combat roles were obviously influenced by MMO gameplay and the huge market for that kind of theme that existed in the 00's. {scrubbed}

Agreed (though less so with the insult.)


5e isn't just lighter on rules for the sake of change, it's pretty easy to see the RPG market is heading that way and I'm not sure it's ever coming back.

I disagree - again, rules heavy is getting easier to run with the advancement of technology. Consider roll20 being able to handle things like dynamic lighting effects and line of sight on the fly. "Can I see him" (and the reverse, "can he see me") is a concept that rules-heavy struggles with routinely in the tabletop arena. Rules-light simply shrugs and responds with "what does the story say happens?" which to the guy searching (or trying not to be found) can frequently be unsatisfying or feel cheap.

Consider also Shadowrun - another rules heavy game, that has a fairly appealing and faithful digital adaptation. The computer tracks all the details like movement, success % and AP for you, leaving you free to focus on plot without giving up that crunchiness.

So before too long we may be able to have our cake and eat it too. I'm very interested in what Obsidian is coming out with for PF for instance.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-22, 03:52 PM
The idea of at will and encounter powers and combat roles were obviously influenced by MMO gameplay and the huge market for that kind of theme that existed in the 00's. {scrubbed}

And why argue in favor of it if you can just make baseless assertions about people you disagree with.

BWR
2015-05-22, 04:24 PM
And why argue in favor of it if you can just make baseless assertions about people you disagree with.

Because it seems obvious to us? So arguing that it is nothing like WoW because it's not a perfect match is ignoring very obvious influences?

Wartex1
2015-05-22, 04:24 PM
Agreed.



I disagree - again, rules heavy is getting easier to run with the advancement of technology. Consider roll20 being able to handle things like dynamic lighting effects and line of sight on the fly. "Can I see him" (and the reverse, "can he see me") is a concept that rules-heavy struggles with routinely in the tabletop arena. Rules-light simply shrugs and responds with "what does the story say happens?" which to the guy searching (or trying not to be found) can frequently be unsatisfying or feel cheap.

Consider also Shadowrun - another rules heavy game, that has a fairly appealing and faithful digital adaptation. The computer tracks all the details like movement, success % and AP for you, leaving you free to focus on plot without giving up that crunchiness.

So before too long we may be able to have our cake and eat it too. I'm very interested in what Obsidian is coming out with for PF for instance.

The introduction of newer technology into tabletop gaming eventually strays far from what tabletop gaming actually is. At the end, your product will be a video game, not a tabletop game.

Hawkstar
2015-05-22, 04:30 PM
Because it seems obvious to us? So arguing that it is nothing like WoW because it's not a perfect match is ignoring very obvious influences?Except it's not even a close match. 4e is an iteration on late D&D 3.5.

Seerow
2015-05-22, 05:12 PM
Consider also Shadowrun - another rules heavy game, that has a fairly appealing and faithful digital adaptation. The computer tracks all the details like movement, success % and AP for you, leaving you free to focus on plot without giving up that crunchiness.


As somebody who loves the Shadowrun game and bought the computer game immediately when it became available.... the computer game is fun, but a pale shadow of what Shadowrun ttrpg is. Like more dumbed down than NWN compared to actual D&D. The game is fun in its own right, and holds to the same general themes... but mechanically they are nothing alike.


That said, I would absolutely love to see an integrated tech/tabletop game, where the crunch gets handled on tablets/smartphones, and optional integration into a shared screen (like a TV or something to replace battle mats). I think we are at the point where the technology is there... but I am not so sure there is a strong market for it. A lot of people who play TTRPGs abhore the idea of technology in their gaming, which is where you end up seeing comparisons to computer games being used as insults. While it's not all players, or even most of them, I would suspect it is a large enough subsection to make it really hard to hit profitability with it.

Lord Raziere
2015-05-22, 05:31 PM
Nobody at all.

Anyone who actually enjoys WoW recognizes there is almost no similarity between 4e and WoW. Anyone who doesn't like WoW associated 4e with WoW because they are two things they dislike, not because of any actual similarities.

Seriously, the 3e Binder (with its multiple vestiges each with a 4 round cooldown ability) is far more like an MMO based class than anything ever published in 4e. And I don't consider that a bad thing. I think tabletops could actually stand to learn a lot from MMO and other modern RPG design, rather than spinning their wheels and going back to designs that failed 20 years ago.

yeah, 4e is a far cry from being WoW, I like WoW because both sides of the war Horde and Alliance are equally good, because there is a bunch of tech in it that most fantasy seems to shun entirely, and because I get to blast around fireballs and such far more than once a day, or even once per encounter, I mean...the warlock class doesn't even have a dedicated summoning feature for all WoW demons you could like, like the imp with all its snarkiness, the voidwalker for being a solo tank, the succubus because....succubus, felpuppy to eat magic and such and lets not forget the felguard/doomguard for being generally awesome.

and you can't even invest into an engineering skill to make a helicopter, or ride around on a steampunk motorcycle, not to mention that the mages don't get to conjure up food whenever they like, or invest into a tailor skill to make a flying carpet, and your shamans can't become a ghost wolf to run around really fast, while druids are restricted to only one form, 4e is just terrible at modeling world of warcraft- I mean there aren't even any psychics in that world! and it contains no rules for modeling the Forsaken, or the Worgren!

worst of all, 4e can't give you that authentic barrens chat experience of pure stupidity that makes you want to whack out your own brain with a lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

Psyren
2015-05-22, 06:21 PM
Except it's not even a close match. 4e is an iteration on late D&D 3.5.

And late D&D (ToB, ToM) was being developed around the same time that MMOs were getting hot.


The introduction of newer technology into tabletop gaming eventually strays far from what tabletop gaming actually is. At the end, your product will be a video game, not a tabletop game.

This is No True Scotsman fallacy, and on top of that, makes no attempt to define "what tabletop gaming actually is." You don't even need a table anymore really, and 5e's emphasis on "theater of the mind" play is an expansion of that.


That said, I would absolutely love to see an integrated tech/tabletop game, where the crunch gets handled on tablets/smartphones, and optional integration into a shared screen (like a TV or something to replace battle mats). I think we are at the point where the technology is there... but I am not so sure there is a strong market for it. A lot of people who play TTRPGs abhore the idea of technology in their gaming, which is where you end up seeing comparisons to computer games being used as insults. While it's not all players, or even most of them, I would suspect it is a large enough subsection to make it really hard to hit profitability with it.

Baldurs Gate and NWN were plenty profitable, and the latter was over 13 years ago. Not only is the market there, many of those folks ended up migrating to giving tabletop a try, growing that market. I should know, because I was one of them - I'd never even held a character sheet before that game.

Milo v3
2015-05-22, 06:27 PM
So before too long we may be able to have our cake and eat it too. I'm very interested in what Obsidian is coming out with for PF for instance.

Well, Goblinworks is currently working on a PF MMO, so it's the earliest we'll see a digital PF. But because of some legal reasons they can't actually reflect the crunch of the game, iirc.

Wartex1
2015-05-22, 06:38 PM
This is No True Scotsman fallacy, and on top of that, makes no attempt to define "what tabletop gaming actually is." You don't even need a table anymore really, and 5e's emphasis on "theater of the mind" play is an expansion of that.

Actually, that's not a No True Scotsman fallacy, you're misusing the term. I didn't define what a tabletop game was because I thought that was pretty clear to everyone here.

My point still stands, anyways, as continued integration of technology into tabletop games would eventually cross the line into video games. An automated system becomes either a) less mutable or b) more clumsy.

Seerow
2015-05-22, 06:48 PM
Baldurs Gate and NWN were plenty profitable, and the latter was over 13 years ago. Not only is the market there, many of those folks ended up migrating to giving tabletop a try, growing that market. I should know, because I was one of them - I'd never even held a character sheet before that game.


Yes, I agree those games were huge hits, and the first person who can really recreate that magic on a large scale will probably lead the TTRPG industry for the decade following.

What I am not as sure of the market for is a tabletop game intended to be played at the table but heavily integrated into smart phones/tablets to handle the back end crunch for you while you play at the table. Basically imagine D&D but with everyone using smart phones in place of their character sheets, books, dice, and possibly even minis/battlemats. I think that is likely the next logical evolution of the tabletop game, but it is alien enough from most video games that it won't heavily appeal to that market, and the ttrpg market is full of players who would find an idea like that abhorrent. As we can see even from some responses in this thread.

Hawkstar
2015-05-22, 07:16 PM
What I am not as sure of the market for is a tabletop game intended to be played at the table but heavily integrated into smart phones/tablets to handle the back end crunch for you while you play at the table. Basically imagine D&D but with everyone using smart phones in place of their character sheets, books, dice, and possibly even minis/battlemats. I think that is likely the next logical evolution of the tabletop game, but it is alien enough from most video games that it won't heavily appeal to that market, and the ttrpg market is full of players who would find an idea like that abhorrent. As we can see even from some responses in this thread.

.... I hope not. There's something about LCD screens that are highly distracting, and even now, I find that "Phones off" is almost mandatory to get a productive session with me and my players.

In fact, I've even stopped using my computer because of the distraction it brings, resorting to painful handwriting and haphazard note-taking when running games.

JAL_1138
2015-05-22, 07:23 PM
Yes, I agree those games were huge hits, and the first person who can really recreate that magic on a large scale will probably lead the TTRPG industry for the decade following.

What I am not as sure of the market for is a tabletop game intended to be played at the table but heavily integrated into smart phones/tablets to handle the back end crunch for you while you play at the table. Basically imagine D&D but with everyone using smart phones in place of their character sheets, books, dice, and possibly even minis/battlemats. I think that is likely the next logical evolution of the tabletop game, but it is alien enough from most video games that it won't heavily appeal to that market, and the ttrpg market is full of players who would find an idea like that abhorrent. As we can see even from some responses in this thread.

After a year-long campaign on Maptools as a player, and briefly trying to do some basic prep to DM on it, not only will I never use that program again, but I now ban anything more complicated than a TI-89 at my table (graphing calculators are a godsend for people who are bad with numbers; the larger display lets you check your work easier too).

I don't want to program a bucketload of crunch into a computer to play a tabletop game. It's incredibly frustrating, technical difficulties inevitably crop up, internet connections can be dubious in my area, people get distracted looking at cat videos or memes, facebook or reddit or skype, and trying to set up maps and program in macros for enemies, NPCs, and what-have-you is a thousand times more frustrating than writing the dang thing's HP, thac0 and saves down with a pencil and drawing the map with a wet-erase marker.

(edit: I'm not especially strict about the tech ban with regards to smartphones as long as they're not a distraction, but I do not accept virtual dice rolls and really prefer no one brings a laptop.)

Nightgaun7
2015-05-22, 08:16 PM
its attempt to mimic WoW (4E)

ill rek u m8 sware on me mum



the Dungeons and Dragons brand is done with 4e's philosophy for good. If 6th, 7th, 8th editions ever come out, they will probably be significantly less different from previous editions than 4e was from 3.5. This is kind of a shame, in my opinion, because 4e did what it did extremely well, and in the realm of RPG's, there are few developers large enough to make a project resembling 4e.

Aside: Anyone who thinks 4e copied WoW either hasn't read 4e or hasn't played WoW.

Agreed.

One thing that I would really like to have seen if they revisited the 4E style are combo attacks that are specifically designed to have two characters attack together - for example, the Fighter stabs the dragon and then leaves his sword in it and the wizard zaps the sword with a lightning bolt, getting past the magic-resistant skin of the dragon. I haven't really developed it any farther than that, but it always seemed to me that adventurers should be able to use combos like the "fastball special" in a less ad hoc way, and it fits with the 4E style

Flickerdart
2015-05-22, 10:38 PM
.... I hope not. There's something about LCD screens that are highly distracting, and even now, I find that "Phones off" is almost mandatory to get a productive session with me and my players.
My undergraduate thesis was actually on this - the ephemeral nature of digital media due to its inherent mutability. There's a lot to be gained by closing the gap between digital media and physical spaces/interactions, though.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-23, 01:29 AM
Because it seems obvious to us? So arguing that it is nothing like WoW because it's not a perfect match is ignoring very obvious influences?

Good job not addressing the part about dismissing the honest argument of critics as dishonest spam. And please, continue to pretend "the influences are obvious" is an argument, it says more about the rationality of your position that a detractor ever could.

Tvtyrant
2015-05-23, 02:16 AM
What I would like is a shift away from simplicity of design/elegance as a design goal. In particular I would like active defensive and offensive abilities as opposed to mostly static ones, and for them to be used more regularly than 4E. Abilities which allow for the negation of attacks and magic, others which allow the user to move off turn, others to hide, etc. A much more active and participatory combat system in general with more hard denial rather than numbers.

There are lots of things D&D could do still. 5E is aimed at a particular demographic, but the next edition doesn't have to be the same one. My preference if for each edition to be as distinct as possible, rather than a reboot of an older edition. Unlike video games D&D doesn't go through graphics decay, so editions are better served by distinction than by attempting to re-codify older editions.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-23, 05:09 AM
What I would like is a shift away from simplicity of design/elegance as a design goal.

This. This is what I particularly want out of DnD because the incredibly lavish, massive amount of *stuff* is the one thing that really defines the series. Wizards of the Coast is fairly unique among RPG developers for having the ability and will to put out games with incredibly massive systems - hell, systems that wouldn't really work if they weren't as incredibly massive as they are. While simplicity and elegance are virtues in their own ways, you sometimes just want to dig into the hundreds and hundreds of pages of game that DnD offers.


Because it seems obvious to us? So arguing that it is nothing like WoW because it's not a perfect match is ignoring very obvious influences?

Almost everything you have said about 4e's resemblance to WoW makes no sense. Not a single sentence of it has been right alone, nor have they been right when put together.


The feeling that 4e was a WoW was mostly due to the at-will/encounter/daily power use which is far more reminiscient of MMOs in general than the traditional combat and Vancian casting from previous editions.

WoW does not use at-will/encounter/daily powers. WoW released with different classes having different resources (Rage, Energy, Mana, and you might count Soulstones and Hunter pet Focus) that each have different management styles. It literally makes no sense to claim that 4e lifted its powers system from WoW because WoW doesn't have that system.



Classes were also designed with combat roles in mind rather than fantasy literature archetypes (another MMO element)

This is gibberish. WoW and pre-4e DnD both designed classes based on fantasy literature archetypes and you should be able to see that from how every single class in WoW is also a class that exists in pre-4e DnD, and all of WoW's classes are based off the pre-existing literature from the Warcraft universe. WoW and pre-4e DnD also both designed classes based on combat roles, as it was 2e, after all, that started organizing classes into the 4 archetypes of Warriors, Wizards, Priests, and Rogues, and those are combat roles.



and there was far less variation in classes (again, more MMO than earlier D&D) since they all basically worked the same way

Again, this was not a thing in WoW. WoW has many classes with different resources that worked in significantly different ways. Warriors use Rage which makes them more powerful as a fight goes on, Rogues use Energy which makes them most powerful at the beginning of a fight, and then most other classes used mana, which caused them to be steady in power until the fight goes on too long at which point they stop being effective.

Neither do all 4e classes "basically [work] the same way." Even though all the PHB1 classes used the same resource system, the way the classes are designed means they have the equivalent of one unique spell list per class. If you apply this logic to consider all 4e classes similar, that same logic makes 3.5's core wizards, druids, and clerics the same just because they use Vancian spellcasting.


and everything was made to be balanced against each other from the get go rather than accepting that some classes were better than others (more MMO mind-set than previous D&D editions).

Balance is not an ideal unique to WoW, or MMO's, or even computer games in general. Claiming that 4e is copying WoW because it attempts to be balanced is really rather meaningless because a lot of games of all types also attempt to be balanced, including DnD 3.5 which dropped stat restrictions for base classes that were used in previous editions specifically to reduce players' chances of being powerful classes.



So yeah, it's a lot closer to an MMO than a lot of us like.

What defines an MMO is in the letters, which stand for "Massive Multiplayer Online." DnD 4e is neither massive, nor online, and it's only as multiplayer as the other editions of DnD have been. None of your arguments for why 4e resembles an MMO have had anything to do with the concepts "massive," "muliplayer," or "online."

Also, WoW is also not the only MMO, nor the first MMO, nor really even does it share a lot of its DNA with all other MMO's.


Oh, and it royally messed up thirty odd years of stuff (FR, elves-eladrin, etc.) removing it even more from earlier D&D.

This is just about the only not-wrong thing you have pointed out about 4e's resemblance to WoW. It's an opinion, so it's not technically correct either. I agree, though, both 4e and WoW dropped the ball on developing the plot and tone of their setting(s).

oxybe
2015-05-23, 06:28 AM
Saying "No tech" is probably the best way to get me to not play at your table.

I started using my laptop instead of books because the latter were cumbersome to drag around and only had one purpose: it's contents, IE the game. My laptop can hold a .pdf file or open an SRD site that has all that same information but also serve as a means of contact if needed. When my handle or status is changed to "playing D&D" or "busy" i would expect people I know to not bother me with cat videos and the like the same way if I had changed it to anything else then "online". It just lets them know that if they really need to contact me, they can.

The laptop can also be used to hold multiple books worth of information in one physical and digital space. Anyone who'd had to have more then one book open at once at a table with 4-6 others sitting around it can likely agree that space is sometimes limited and is always a precious commodity, doubly so when snacks, maps, character sheets, dice, handouts, etc... are also in play.

The laptop can quickly access errata or check to see if the devs have issued a ruling on a rule interaction. The ability to have a large swath of information a CTRL+Tab away is very nice.

I've recently started looking at electronic dice rollers for that reason, and I've mainly kept my character sheets digital for a while now, barring a lack of fillable pdfs.

Note well that none of this somehow makes the TTRPG turn into "One of them newfangled videogames". It still has a GM sitting at the front of the table directing and interpreting the results of our actions.

Brova
2015-05-23, 08:38 AM
Well, the first thing you absolutely have to do from 5e is scrap bounded accuracy. That is an idea that does not work at all. The fact that you can kill every monster in the MM with a few dozen horse archers obviates the need for heroes. It breaks the game more than almost any idea I can think of.

Honestly, Pathfinder has demonstrated that you can be massively successful as a gaming company just by fiddling around some with 3e and claiming to have fixed things. If you did a solidly rigorous playtest, you could end up with a very successful game. Slap on a reboot of skill challenges, some Logistics and Dragons minigames, and hammer out high level play more. Frankly, that probably needs to be the next direction D&D goes. 3e was the single most popular edition of D&D and providing a version of that which was actually balanced would attract a big chunk of the "lapsed players" WoTC has been trying to get.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 09:05 AM
Actually, I'm fairly certain AD&D was more popular, due to the market at the time. 3.x sold the most books due to having tons of supplements.

Brova
2015-05-23, 09:29 AM
Actually, I'm fairly certain AD&D was more popular, due to the market at the time. 3.x sold the most books due to having tons of supplements.

That's possible. Be that as it may, 3e/3.5 was the most successful edition of D&D and is definitely the place you'd want to go for a new edition.

If I was in charge of the D&D division at WoTC, I'd find something important to D&D's history that happened in 1975 or 1976 and release a 40th anniversary edition based off of 3.5 sometime in the next year and a half. Use that to get people back on board with the product, and as a dumping ground for various playtest options, then release AD&D 3e a year or so later.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 09:43 AM
3.5e already was AD&D for 3e. Though I'm fairly certain that Wizards doesn't actually have the rights to the term "AD&D".

If Wizards wants to expand their market like they're doing with 5E, then I don't think that's the way they should go. 5E with more options, better higher-level options, and only partially bounded accuracy (Not as wide as 3e, but wider than 5e) might be the way to go.

Sword Coast Legends might also rope in a lot of the newer crowd if it does well.

Brova
2015-05-23, 09:54 AM
If Wizards wants to expand their market like they're doing with 5E, then I don't think that's the way they should go. 5E with more options, better higher-level options, and only partially bounded accuracy (Not as wide as 3e, but wider than 5e) might be the way to go.

WoTC is not actually "expanding their market" with 5e. They aren't hitting the numbers they hit with 3e, so they have (relative to peak) shrunk their market. Also, as far as I can tell what you're describing is just 3e. Bounded accuracy was the big selling point of 5e, and it is a nonstarter for a game where you play heroes who go off and fight monsters the militia can't.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 10:02 AM
4E shrunk the market. 5E is expanding it again. Just because it's not as high as it used to be doesn't mean that it's not growth. 5E isn't less popular than 3E because of its own merit, but because of 4E and people being scared to update after that.

Also, I'm not describing 3e, mainly because 3.x is a glaring mess of overly complicated and often poorly made rules. Bounded accuracy also isn't the major selling point of 5e. Simplicity, straightforwardness, and ease of access is.

Brova
2015-05-23, 10:14 AM
4E shrunk the market. 5E is expanding it again. Just because it's not as high as it used to be doesn't mean that it's not growth. 5E isn't less popular than 3E because of its own merit, but because of 4E and people being scared to update after that.

3E took D&D from "bankrupt" to "most successful RPG in history". If 5e can't manage to win people over that fast with a decade and a half of extra knowledge and experience, I'm not holding my breath.


Also, I'm not describing 3e, mainly because 3.x is a glaring mess of overly complicated and often poorly made rules. Bounded accuracy also isn't the major selling point of 5e. Simplicity, straightforwardness, and ease of access is.

I'm sorry, what exactly has 5e simplified?

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 10:30 AM
5E simplified pretty much everything. Combat is smoother, skills are streamlined, you don't have thousands of feats, classes are well written and balanced for the most part, you don't have 10 pages of grappling rules, weapon properties are simple, spellcasting is streamlined, etc.

Have you even looked at 5E?

Psyren
2015-05-23, 10:49 AM
WoTC is not actually "expanding their market" with 5e. They aren't hitting the numbers they hit with 3e, so they have (relative to peak) shrunk their market. Also, as far as I can tell what you're describing is just 3e. Bounded accuracy was the big selling point of 5e, and it is a nonstarter for a game where you play heroes who go off and fight monsters the militia can't.

Per Paizo's CEO Erik Mona, 5e is in fact expanding the market. (http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/31250/icv2-interview-paizo-publisher-erik-mona)


Well, Goblinworks is currently working on a PF MMO, so it's the earliest we'll see a digital PF. But because of some legal reasons they can't actually reflect the crunch of the game, iirc.

No, not that one; I couldn't care less about the Goblinworks MMO. I'm talking about the upcoming Obsidian game. (https://www.pixeldynamo.com/news/gaming/2014/08/14/24352/paizo-obsidian-team-pathfinder-video-games/) They're doing a card game first, then reportedly they're doing a NWN-style isometric virtual tabletop with GM tools etc.


Actually, that's not a No True Scotsman fallacy, you're misusing the term. I didn't define what a tabletop game was because I thought that was pretty clear to everyone here.

If it's clear to everyone, how are you getting it wrong? Do you honestly think tabletop games need actual tables to fit the name? Do you also think a grid and minis are essential to the experience?



My point still stands, anyways, as continued integration of technology into tabletop games would eventually cross the line into video games. An automated system becomes either a) less mutable or b) more clumsy.

There is plenty in this game that doesn't need to be mutable. If you flank someone, and have a special ability that says anyone you flank is also shaken, those are simple calculations - computers can apply those automatically all day long. For a human GM, they are just two more data points to remember on top of every other condition and modifier that can be flying around during any given combat.

No one's saying a computer should replace a flesh-and-blood GM entirely (though one day that may be possible, once we have true AI) - but augmenting the capabilities of a human DM, either directly or indirectly


After a year-long campaign on Maptools as a player, and briefly trying to do some basic prep to DM on it, not only will I never use that program again, but I now ban anything more complicated than a TI-89 at my table (graphing calculators are a godsend for people who are bad with numbers; the larger display lets you check your work easier too).

I don't want to program a bucketload of crunch into a computer to play a tabletop game. It's incredibly frustrating, technical difficulties inevitably crop up, internet connections can be dubious in my area, people get distracted looking at cat videos or memes, facebook or reddit or skype, and trying to set up maps and program in macros for enemies, NPCs, and what-have-you is a thousand times more frustrating than writing the dang thing's HP, thac0 and saves down with a pencil and drawing the map with a wet-erase marker.

The thing with Maptools though is that it's a generic tool designed to work with a wide variety of RPGs out there. So of course setting that up will require a lot of prep work. The Obsidian game meanwhile will be designed for PF from the get-go, so things like skills and XP tracks and CMB/CMD and conditions/spells will be programmed in from the start.

Brova
2015-05-23, 10:51 AM
Combat is smoother,

I can't actually speak to that, because I haven't played 5e. But if the rest of your claims are any indication, no.


skills are streamlined,

As far as I can tell, skills have been simplified to "see what your DM says", which is exactly like not having a skill system.


you don't have thousands of feats,

Neither did core 3e.


classes are well written and balanced for the most part,

You mean the thing where you either have a bunch of minions or suck? That's not balanced.


you don't have 10 pages of grappling rules,

Alright, I'll give you that.


weapon properties are simple,

No, not so much. It's basically the same as 3e.


spellcasting is streamlined, etc.

How exactly? It seems to be exactly the same as 3e, except with heightening doing something. Oh and they kept the schools of magic. And the pointless the verbose spell rules. But they did streamline the short spell descriptions at the beginning of the chapter.


Have you even looked at 5E?

Well, not all of it. For example, there is no way I'm reading 5 pages of description for "elf". But the game seems to have bloated everything to a massive degree (seriously, you could fit perfectly serviceable writeups for every race into the section for elf).

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:22 AM
You're being fairly obtuse about objective facts in 5E.

The skills are condensed and are easier to track modifiers for.

Feats are simple, useful, and there are very few trap options. Even core 3e had a very large amount of feats.

Your statement about minions is very blunt, seeing as how its really hard to actually have a character who sucks, and minions aren't class exclusive.

Weapons are simplified, with having fewer poor options, standard crit range and multiplier, and following simple damage progression. Plus, weapon use isn't a hassle.

For spellcasting, there's the Concentration rules which replace many of the 3e rules, lack of full-round spells, that sort of thing.


It's pretty plain to see how much 5E simplified things, making getting into it much easier, remembering all the rules easily, and fairly easy to create a character AFB.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 11:23 AM
3.5e already was AD&D for 3e. Though I'm fairly certain that Wizards doesn't actually have the rights to the term "AD&D".Yes they do. They deliberately named AD&D 3e to avoid confusing the customer base they were trying to expand to - the Basic line of D&D was dead and gone, and so "Advanced" was dropped from the title.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:26 AM
If it's clear to everyone, how are you getting it wrong? Do you honestly think tabletop games need actual tables to fit the name? Do you also think a grid and minis are essential to the experience?

Getting it wrong? Getting what wrong? You're stuffing words into my mouth.

Did I ever say that you need a grid, minis, or even an actual table to play a tabletop game?

I said that the continuation of escalating usage of technology eventually crosses the line from tabletop game to video game.

Is that clear? Is there anything to get wrong in that?

No?

No.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:28 AM
Yes they do. They deliberately named AD&D 3e to avoid confusing the customer base they were trying to expand to - the Basic line of D&D was dead and gone, and so "Advanced" was dropped from the title.

Okay. I remembered that they only had one of the two.

Still doesn't change much though. 3.5 was essentially 3e's "AD&D" in terms of how AD&D is a more defined, better made, and more balanced version of OD&D.

Psyren
2015-05-23, 11:30 AM
Getting it wrong? Getting what wrong? You're stuffing words into my mouth.

Did I ever say that you need a grid, minis, or even an actual table to play a tabletop game?

I said that the continuation of escalating usage of technology eventually crosses the line from tabletop game to video game.

Is that clear? Is there anything to get wrong in that?

No?

No.

It's as clear as mud because you have yet to say what the bold line even means or why it even might be bad. What on earth does "the line from a tabletop game to video game" entail? Why is there even a line at all unless you somehow erroneously believe these two media to be mutually exclusive, and why do you believe that?

I'm not putting words in your mouth, I'm trying to get to the bottom of what you yourself are claiming because you won't elaborate.

Brova
2015-05-23, 11:34 AM
Feats are simple, useful, and there are very few trap options. Even core 3e had a very large amount of feats.

I'm not actually willing to crawl through the book to prove you wrong, but I very much doubt that. Every edition with feats has had the majority of them as trap options.


Your statement about minions is very blunt, seeing as how its really hard to actually have a character who sucks, and minions aren't class exclusive.

Minions are the number one selling point of being a necromancer. And yes, minions are the one true path to ultimate power. Because of bounded accuracy.

Seriously, no book as bloated and poorly written as the 5e PHB gets to count itself as a simplification. You want to see something that is actually simple, concise, and well written? Read Frank & K's Tomes.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:38 AM
No, you said "how are you getting it wrong?"

That implies that there is something to be wrong about it.

The difference between a video game and a tabletop game is how its played. A video game is a digital medium, and a tabletop game is a physical medium. The physical medium is more malleable due to the limits of the digital medium. Eventually, there will be a point where the digital medium can match the physical medium it mutability and ease of access. Switching to a primarily digital medium is, by definition, transitioning from a tabletop game, which uses easily accessed resources with a wider physical medium, to a video game, which uses a digital medium.

Did I ever say video games were a bad thing? I'm fairly certain I didn't.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:45 AM
I'm not actually willing to crawl through the book to prove you wrong, but I very much doubt that. Every edition with feats has had the majority of them as trap options.



Minions are the number one selling point of being a necromancer. And yes, minions are the one true path to ultimate power. Because of bounded accuracy.

Seriously, no book as bloated and poorly written as the 5e PHB gets to count itself as a simplification. You want to see something that is actually simple, concise, and well written? Read Frank & K's Tomes.

5E's PHB is a glorious masterpiece compared to 3.5's.

Any class can have minions due to hiring creatures.

I'll point at the actual trap options for feats:

Weapon Master

That's pretty much it. Other "bad" feats aren't actually bad, but just somewhat suboptimal, though very useful if you know how to apply them. These feats are:

Athlete
Actor
Dungeon Delver (For dungeon crawlers)
Keen Mind
Tavern Brawler

So, that's one bad feat and five relatively poor feats compared to godly options like GWM. That's 6 out of 42 feats, with about half of them being very useful.

Psyren
2015-05-23, 11:50 AM
A video game is a digital medium, and a tabletop game is a physical medium.

So all the folks playing D&D on platforms like roll20, Tabletop Simulator or even just Skype, are they not playing a tabletop game? These are all digital mediums, not physical ones, so by your definition above (which is again arbitrarily mutually exclusive) they must be video games and stop being tabletop games. However, I would say that in digital tabletop like roll20, the computer enhances the tabletop experience there - allowing the group to do things like play with each other across any distance, or adjudicate all dice rolls fairly without any cheating (including looking back at old rolls due to chatlogs), or create elaborate maps of any size and setting without huge spatial expenditures by the GM. It allows the automation of many rules as well, like vision and light, or initiative tracking, or adding up bonuses and penalties, that would ordinarily all have to be managed manually.


Did I ever say video games were a bad thing? I'm fairly certain I didn't.

No, what you're saying is it's "less malleable/mutable" and has "lower ease of access." These are true in some respects but false in others.

A game with predefined code will have limits that playing purely on paper will not, yes - but automation also frees up "mental real estate" from the GM who no longer has to track everything going on in his head, and therefore he can actually gain flexibility as a result. Similarly, you can't broadly state with certainty which medium would be easier to access. Just for very practical starters, a gaming group where one or more members lives in another city or country would have a much lower ease of access using roll20 than any form of physical meeting. And even for groups that are physically capable of getting together, roll20 offers other benefits as mentioned above - including for the GM, who does not have to stick completely with predrawn maps or create any by hand.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 11:52 AM
Okay. I remembered that they only had one of the two.

Still doesn't change much though. 3.5 was essentially 3e's "AD&D" in terms of how AD&D is a more defined, better made, and more balanced version of OD&D.

Except it's not. OD&D and AD&D were two different beasts. 3.5 was a revision, closer to the difference between BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia for Basic D&D.

Brova
2015-05-23, 11:56 AM
5E's PHB is a glorious masterpiece compared to 3.5's.

No. 3.5's PHB could be cleaned up, but it's vastly more efficient than 5e's.


Any class can have minions due to hiring creatures.

I notice you have yet to actually explain how D&D makes any sense in a world where the solution to all problems is "throw some minions at it." At best hiring minions reduces the marginal gap between the Necromancer and you - it doesn't fix any of the problems induced by bounded accuracy.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 11:59 AM
So all the folks playing D&D on platforms like roll20, Tabletop Simulator or even just Skype, are they not playing a tabletop game? These are all digital mediums, not physical ones, so by your definition above (which is again arbitrarily mutually exclusive) they must be video games and stop being tabletop games. However, I would say that in digital tabletop like roll20, the computer enhances the tabletop experience there - allowing the group to do things like play with each other across any distance, or adjudicate all dice rolls fairly without any cheating (including looking back at old rolls due to chatlogs), or create elaborate maps of any size and setting without huge spatial expenditures by the GM. It allows the automation of many rules as well, like vision and light, or initiative tracking, or adding up bonuses and penalties, that would ordinarily all have to be managed manually.



No, what you're saying is it's "less malleable/mutable" and has "lower ease of access." These are true in some respects but false in others.

A game with predefined code will have limits that playing purely on paper will not, yes - but automation also frees up "mental real estate" from the GM who no longer has to track everything going on in his head, and therefore he can actually gain flexibility as a result. Similarly, you can't broadly state with certainty which medium would be easier to access. Just for very practical starters, a gaming group where one or more members lives in another city or country would have a much lower ease of access using roll20 than any form of physical meeting. And even for groups that are physically capable of getting together, roll20 offers other benefits as mentioned above - including for the GM, who does not have to stick completely with predrawn maps or create any by hand.

Again, did I say that video games were bad? Roll20 is using a tabletop system as a video game, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

When I talked about ease of access, it was in conjunction with higher mutability. It's easier to alter a physical system than a digital one in most cases.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 12:01 PM
I notice you have yet to actually explain how D&D makes any sense in a world where the solution to all problems is "throw some minions at it." At best hiring minions reduces the marginal gap between the Necromancer and you - it doesn't fix any of the problems induced by bounded accuracy.
In practice, fear of the necromancer has been unfounded.

The thing about "Throw some minions at it" is it requires you to actually have minions to throw at something. And be able to throw them at something.

You should actually play the game instead of relying on alarmist and inaccurate hearsay.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 12:02 PM
No. 3.5's PHB could be cleaned up, but it's vastly more efficient than 5e's.



I notice you have yet to actually explain how D&D makes any sense in a world where the solution to all problems is "throw some minions at it." At best hiring minions reduces the marginal gap between the Necromancer and you - it doesn't fix any of the problems induced by bounded accuracy.

I wouldn't call 10 pages of grappling rules, obtuse design philosophies, and horrible wastes of resources to be efficient.

And hiring minions doesn't "reduce the gap" it fully bridges it. Hiring a minion doesn't consume spell slots, and using actual in-universe economy is cheaper as well.

Brova
2015-05-23, 12:13 PM
In practice, fear of the necromancer has been unfounded.

I very much doubt that. It is a statement of absolute mathematical fact that bounded accuracy makes minions overpowered. If everyone is on the same RNG, then 1st level characters are a perfectly reasonable solution to 20th level problems.

Now, I suspect that the Necromancer isn't broken in practice for the same reason that people don't chain bind legions of Efreet in practice - it kills the game. But that doesn't make bounded accuracy any less idiotic.


I wouldn't call 10 pages of grappling rules, obtuse design philosophies, and horrible wastes of resources to be efficient.

Care to explain any of those complaints? Well, not the grapple thing. I get that, just not why it's so important to your enjoyment of an edition of D&D that it have good grapple rules.


And hiring minions doesn't "reduce the gap" it fully bridges it. Hiring a minion doesn't consume spell slots, and using actual in-universe economy is cheaper as well.

Okay, now bear with me. What if we took the money we were giving the PC for his adventuring, and used it to hire more minions. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 12:30 PM
Wizards need money to scribe their spells more than fighters need it for equipment, which they'll get in the form of magic items anyways.

Let's pit an army of of 30 skeletons, so that's all your 5th and 4th level spell slots for a day, plus you actually need 30 piles of bones lying around, against an iconic high-level monster, like an Ancient Red Dragon.

Skeletons hit on an 18-20, dealing 11 damage on each strike. So, with 15% of skeletons hitting with an extra 2 damage every third hit, you have 4.5 skeletons actually hitting for a total of around 52 damage per round.

However, the dragon's breath weapon can kill them all with an impossible save, gets legendary actions, can fly out of range. I'm not even counting Frightful Presence, which basically makes it impossible for the skeletons to damage it since they can't make the save.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 12:39 PM
I very much doubt that. It is a statement of absolute mathematical fact that bounded accuracy makes minions overpowered. If everyone is on the same RNG, then 1st level characters are a perfectly reasonable solution to 20th level problems.The 'mathematical fact' doesn't hold up in actual play.


Now, I suspect that the Necromancer isn't broken in practice for the same reason that people don't chain bind legions of Efreet in practice - it kills the game. But that doesn't make bounded accuracy any less idiotic.More that the effort wasn't worth the lack of payoff.

Okay, now bear with me. What if we took the money we were giving the PC for his adventuring, and used it to hire more minions. Wouldn't that be more efficient?Nope. Minions don't get the results you seem to think they do, nor have the staying power of a PC.

Brova
2015-05-23, 12:51 PM
So what are the actual numbers on that dragon? AC? HP? Frightful presence? And how do skeletons work?

Now, it might be true that the correct strategy is to be minionmancer who hires minions instead of making them. But at that point you're just a king, and the need for heroes is removed.

Lets do this again with an Adult Blue Dragon and some Acolytes (who've picked up a ranged weapon with the same stats as their club to simplify some things).

Each Acolyte hits on a 17+ (20% of the time) for an average of 2.5 damage. So each Acolyte deals .5 damage every round. It takes less than 500 Acolytes to kill the Adult Blue Dragon in one round.

Now, the dragon gets Frightful Presence at DC 17, allowing a new save every round. Acolytes succeed on 15+, 30% of the time on the first round, 51% on the second, and so on. If it does that, it can also kill two Acolytes. It also gets a breath weapon which kills up to 18 Acolytes.

So here's how combat goes against 200 Acolytes:

Round one: About 20 die to breath weapon. Dragon takes 90.
Round two: About 126 are incapacitated by frightful presence. Three die. Dragon takes 15 (total 105).
Round three: About 90 are still incapacitated by frightful presence. Three die. Dragon takes 40 (total 145).
Repeat from there with more minions recovering from fear than die.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:04 PM
The Dragon has an AC of 22. Frightful Presence has a DC of 21, and the Skeletons have a -2 to Wis saves, so they can never make it. It forces disadvantage, making skeletons never work.

Also, you chose an Adult Blue Dragon, which has a much lower CR (24 vs 16), lower AC, lower save DCs, a much worse breath weapon, and is overall much weaker than an Ancient Red Dragon.

Plus, it's an Adult Blue Dragon. Why wouldn't 500 trained soldiers armed with a ton of shortbows with a much higher encounter difficulty beating it make sense?

Two soldiers who are half as strong as one soldier will be better than that one soldier due to having two sets of everything. Sure, you might not punch that hard, but you punch twice as much.

EDIT: An Adult Blue Dragon isn't a high-level challenge anyways. It's a Hard encounter for 4 PCs of level 12 or a Deadly encounter for 10th level PCs.

500 Acolytes is a lot more than that. Plus, 4 adventurers are easier to manage, pay, feed, armor, and take care of than 500 Acolytes.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 01:05 PM
Each Acolyte hits on a 17+ (20% of the time) for an average of 2.5 damage. So each Acolyte deals .5 damage every round. It takes less than 500 Acolytes to kill the Adult Blue Dragon in one round.Except that doesn't happen - The dragon will never face 500 acolytes.

Psyren
2015-05-23, 01:07 PM
Again, did I say that video games were bad? Roll20 is using a tabletop system as a video game, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

When I talked about ease of access, it was in conjunction with higher mutability. It's easier to alter a physical system than a digital one in most cases.

Sure, but it's easier for a digital one to track multiple ongoing conditions and other background factors. So "ease" becomes relative - whichever one you need more, that will be the one that's easier for you.

And again, digital medium does not stop it from being tabletop. If I play 5e with friends over Skype using "theater of the mind" I am not playing a "video game." I'm playing a tabletop game where not everyone happens to be in the same room. I don't even need a table. My point is that "tabletop" and "digital" are not mutually exclusive, which you appear to believe.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:10 PM
Sure, but it's easier for a digital one to track multiple ongoing conditions and other background factors. So "ease" becomes relative - whichever one you need more, that will be the one that's easier for you.

And again, digital medium does not stop it from being tabletop. If I play 5e with friends over Skype using "theater of the mind" I am not playing a "video game." I'm playing a tabletop game where not everyone happens to be in the same room. I don't even need a table. My point is that "tabletop" and "digital" are not mutually exclusive, which you appear to believe.

If you play over Skype, you're still using a physical medium, but a digital communication. The game is still managed physically. When the game is managed digitally, that's when the transition would occur.

Psyren
2015-05-23, 01:12 PM
If you play over Skype, you're still using a physical medium, but a digital communication. The game is still managed physically. When the game is managed digitally, that's when the transition would occur.

The medium IS the method of communication, because communication is how you play. That's what "medium" means.

Brova
2015-05-23, 01:21 PM
The Dragon has an AC of 22. Frightful Presence has a DC of 21, and the Skeletons have a -2 to Wis saves, so they can never make it. It forces disadvantage, making skeletons never work.

Alright, so not skeletons.


Also, you chose an Adult Blue Dragon, which has a much lower CR (24 vs 16), lower AC, lower save DCs, a much worse breath weapon, and is overall much weaker than an Ancient Red Dragon.

Yes, it is but that doesn't actually change the concept. Against the Ancient Red you hit 5% of the time, so to one round it you need (assuming 500 HP) 4000 soldiers. That's not even 1% the strength that the Roman Empire could muster.


Plus, it's an Adult Blue Dragon. Why wouldn't 500 trained soldiers armed with a ton of shortbows with a much higher encounter difficulty beating it make sense?

Because that's not how the source material works. Smaug isn't killed by a bunch of soldiers - in fact, he slaughters an entire city full of people - he's killed by one dude who is hardcore. Also, and more importantly, because that's not how the game needs to work. If you can conscript a bunch of peasants to kill the dragon, you don't need heroes.


500 Acolytes is a lot more than that. Plus, 4 adventurers are easier to manage, pay, feed, armor, and take care of than 500 Acolytes.

Except that doesn't happen - The dragon will never face 500 acolytes.

As far as I can tell, those Acolytes are just random humans. You know what a kingdom has a surplus of? Random humans. 500 people is seriously 5% of the Roman commitment to the battle of Cannae. Every kingdom worth of the name has a military capable of killing any dragon in 5e. Which sort of obviates the whole "go kill the dragon menacing the kingdom" plot.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:21 PM
The medium IS the method of communication, because communication is how you play. That's what "medium" means.

Is the game run by the program?

If it's not, then it's not a digital medium, and only a part of the game is handled digitally.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:29 PM
Alright, so not skeletons.



Yes, it is but that doesn't actually change the concept. Against the Ancient Red you hit 5% of the time, so to one round it you need (assuming 500 HP) 4000 soldiers. That's not even 1% the strength that the Roman Empire could muster.



Because that's not how the source material works. Smaug isn't killed by a bunch of soldiers - in fact, he slaughters an entire city full of people - he's killed by one dude who is hardcore. Also, and more importantly, because that's not how the game needs to work. If you can conscript a bunch of peasants to kill the dragon, you don't need heroes.




As far as I can tell, those Acolytes are just random humans. You know what a kingdom has a surplus of? Random humans. 500 people is seriously 5% of the Roman commitment to the battle of Cannae. Every kingdom worth of the name has a military capable of killing any dragon in 5e. Which sort of obviates the whole "go kill the dragon menacing the kingdom" plot.

Those acolytes aren't random humans.

A commoner wouldn't be proficient with a shortbow, and would have a DEX of 10, since that's the average.

That means the only way to hit is by a critical, which is a 1/400 chance with disadvantage.

Smaug is also the equivalent of an Ancient Red Dragon, not an Adult. A peasant couldn't resist the Frightful Presence at all, since again, DC of 21 and no proficiency. The peasants also wouldn't effectively organize and be able to arm themselves that well, so a village of 500 might lend you maybe 50 actually competent fighters, with 200 of the total population having some usable weapons of sorts. That's not counting those who flee or cower. Smaug still destroys everything with his fire breath, which is a 90ft cone.

Smaug also has 546 HP, a Fly speed of 80, Legendary Resistance, and can use improvised weapons to throw boulders from high in the sky.

Gnorman
2015-05-23, 01:32 PM
Given the shrinking staff of the D&D department, the frequent farming out of work to third parties (including people they have previously fired), and the general lackadaisical attitude that I feel the designers have shown towards growing the brand in any significant way (5e may be expanding the market, but it's expanding on the quite frankly dismal sales of 4e, so it still significantly lags its biggest competitor, Pathfinder) my prediction for 6th Edition is one of two things:

1. There is no 6th Edition. Hasbro gets fed up with dragging along a barely-functioning D&D department and cans them all. There is no replacement.

2. 6th Edition isn't made by Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro gets fed up with dragging along a barely-functioning D&D department, cans them all, but licenses the IP out to a third party developer.

The sad fact is that the money in D&D isn't in D&D itself. It's in ancillary products like board games, miniatures, video games, etc. Now, if Hasbro was willing to invest significant money into a bunch of tie-ins, hire a functioning team that isn't just "Mike Mearls' gaming buddies," and actually give them the funding to function, I think you could see the rollout of a good 6th Edition, one that might have a chance to revive the brand. But I don't think they will. Because MTG brings in a quarter of a billion dollars each year, and D&D is peanuts compared to that. Why divert significant funding to what is basically a legacy product at this point?

Brova
2015-05-23, 01:44 PM
Those acolytes aren't random humans.

A commoner wouldn't be proficient with a shortbow, and would have a DEX of 10, since that's the average.

That means the only way to hit is by a critical, which is a 1/400 chance with disadvantage.

Except near as I can tell, frightful presence needs to be activated by the dragon and doesn't apply if you're trying to one round it. And if crits work like 3.5 (double damage), you actually end up needing even less peasants.


Smaug is also the equivalent of an Ancient Red Dragon, not an Adult. A peasant couldn't resist the Frightful Presence at all, since again, DC of 21 and no proficiency. The peasants also wouldn't effectively organize and be able to arm themselves that well, so a village of 500 might lend you maybe 50 actually competent fighters, with 200 of the total population having some usable weapons of sorts. That's not counting those who flee or cower. Smaug still destroys everything with his fire breath, which is a 90ft cone.

Smaug also has 546 HP, a Fly speed of 80, Legendary Resistance, and can use improvised weapons to throw boulders from high in the sky.

So the dragon's tactic is to fly out of range and drop boulders? And no, the dragon can't use its breath weapon. Because if it closes to bow range, somewhere between two and four thousand commoners will kill it. Which is, again, on the order of 1% of the population of a good sized medieval city.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 01:48 PM
As far as I can tell, those Acolytes are just random humans. You know what a kingdom has a surplus of? Random humans. 500 people is seriously 5% of the Roman commitment to the battle of Cannae. Every kingdom worth of the name has a military capable of killing any dragon in 5e. Which sort of obviates the whole "go kill the dragon menacing the kingdom" plot.
But no dragon is dumb enough to allow a kingdom to mass up, organize, and rally an army to march against it.

In D&D, cunning is king. 5e has gone 'back' to that. Armies have the power to destroy a dragon, but they don't have the precision to even engage it. Heroes combine power and precision.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:55 PM
Except near as I can tell, frightful presence needs to be activated by the dragon and doesn't apply if you're trying to one round it. And if crits work like 3.5 (double damage), you actually end up needing even less peasants.



So the dragon's tactic is to fly out of range and drop boulders? And no, the dragon can't use its breath weapon. Because if it closes to bow range, somewhere between two and four thousand commoners will kill it. Which is, again, on the order of 1% of the population of a good sized medieval city.

And those commoners need to be trained, fed, not run away, armed, not run away from the giant angry dragon, not be burnt to a crisp, not be crushed, not cower, not run for their lives, and be well organized. Good luck with that.

Most people wouldn't stop and shoot a dragon, who can easily fly well outside of their bow's effective range, instead of running away. The Dragon even has Frightful Presence to enforce this, meaning that the dragon could just lob boulders from a safe distance since no one wants to get near it.

Sending in 4 dumb adventurers who are already armed to the teeth and have a good chance of actually succeeding against the dragon costs much less than militarizing a good chunk of your population. Nothing is stopping the dragon from just burning all the crops.

Brova
2015-05-23, 01:56 PM
But no dragon is dumb enough to allow a kingdom to mass up, organize, and rally an army to march against it.

In D&D, cunning is king. 5e has gone 'back' to that. Armies have the power to destroy a dragon, but they don't have the precision to even engage it. Heroes combine power and precision.

So what exactly does the dragon do? If it moves against the kingdom, it gets killed by commoners. And what good are heroes? They also die to impressively small numbers of troops.


And those commoners need to be trained, fed, not run away, armed, not run away from the giant angry dragon, not be burnt to a crisp, not be crushed, not cower, not run for their lives, and be well organized. Good luck with that.

No, they don't. They need a bow and to shoot at the dragon once. There is zero training required and frankly, you don't even have to use commoners. An army on par with armies of the medieval era is perfectly capable of killing the dragon without risking meaningful losses.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 01:58 PM
Again, would these commoners have an organized force ready to protect their homes against a dragon? What's stopping the dragon, who is an intelligent being, from just performing sweeping attacks to kill off the population in a series of skirmishes. What's stopping the dragon from burning the food supply? What's stopping him from lighting a city block on fire and then watch the rest of the city burn?

EDIT:

Let's do some more calculations. An untrained commoner can only hit on a 20, which is a 1/400 chance because of range and Frightful Presence.

Each hit deals 7 damage.

So, that means it takes 30400 commoners, all using shortbows, to kill the dragon in one round, since the dragon could just run away if it was badly hurt.

One shortbow with 10 arrows costs 35 gp. That's more than a month's wages of money for a commoner, not counting living expenses. That means 1,064,000 gp. A standard american gold coin has 31 grams of gold in it.

That means 32984 kg of gold (72717.273 lbs).

Gold is about 38,706.28 USD per kilogram.

That much gold costs 1,276,687,939.52 USD.

The world GDP is about 75,592,941 USD.

That means all those supplies would cost about 16.8889835827 years worth of the entire world's GDP.

That's way too much money.

Brova
2015-05-23, 02:00 PM
Again, would these commoners have an organized force ready to protect their homes against a dragon? What's stopping the dragon, who is an intelligent being, from just performing sweeping attacks to kill off the population in a series of skirmishes. What's stopping the dragon from burning the food supply? What's stopping him from lighting a city block on fire and then watch the rest of the city burn?

The fact that the mechanics don't support that. Because if he closes to use his breath weapon, he dies. Horribly.

EDIT: Also worth noting that these are the numbers for level zero nobodies. Imagine some people with a level or three in an actual class.

EDIT 2: Why do we care how much gold it costs in terms of the GDP of the real world? Also, the dragon doesn't actually give people disadvantage until it acts, at which point it can't breath (correct me if I'm wrong, that's what I took from having "frightful presence + 3 attacks" as an action). Also, what's the range on a bow in 5e? Assuming we're looking at 100ft (like 3e), that's roughly 10,000 archers within range at any given point. Hitting on a 20, that's 500 hits, for 3500 damage.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 02:11 PM
The fact that the mechanics don't support that. Because if he closes to use his breath weapon, he dies. Horribly.

EDIT: Also worth noting that these are the numbers for level zero nobodies. Imagine some people with a level or three in an actual class.

A 10 in a stat is defined as the average. Proficiency in a weapon means that you're trained to use it, which commoners are not. Level 1 is the baseline of all normal people. Classes are also for PCs.

In addition, people are not going to pack around a dragon to try and kill it when there is a very real chance of those people dying horribly. These are not trained soldiers. These are civilians.

EDIT: Also, only 4096 commoners can fit inside a 320x320 ft grid. The shortbow's maximum range is 320 ft.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 02:16 PM
The fact that the mechanics don't support that. Because if he closes to use his breath weapon, he dies. Horribly.

EDIT: Also worth noting that these are the numbers for level zero nobodies. Imagine some people with a level or three in an actual class.

EDIT 2: Why do we care how much gold it costs in terms of the GDP of the real world? Also, the dragon doesn't actually give people disadvantage until it acts, at which point it can't breath (correct me if I'm wrong, that's what I took from having "frightful presence + 3 attacks" as an action). Also, what's the range on a bow in 5e? Assuming we're looking at 100ft (like 3e), that's roughly 10,000 archers within range at any given point. Hitting on a 20, that's 500 hits, for 3500 damage.

Range is 320 ft, but you don't have 1 commoner per square foot.

Frightful Presence and being outside of 80 ft (the optimal range) imposes disadvantage, which is roll twice take the lower roll. That means you only hit 1/400 times.

Brova
2015-05-23, 02:19 PM
A 10 in a stat is defined as the average. Proficiency in a weapon means that you're trained to use it, which commoners are not. Level 1 is the baseline of all normal people. Classes are also for PCs.

In addition, people are not going to pack around a dragon to try and kill it when there is a very real chance of those people dying horribly. These are not trained soldiers. These are civilians.

Except they're soldiers, because the number you need is an actual order of magnitude smaller than army sizes in the historic period D&D emulates.


EDIT: Also, only 4096 commoners can fit inside a 320x320 ft grid. The shortbow's maximum range is 320 ft.

Actually, it's a circle with r = 320. 320 * 320 * 3 / 25 ~ 11,000. My math was off too, I forgot to account for 5ft squares. Assuming trained soldiers with longbows, you can fit 2,700 inside short range of the dragon (simplified to 2D). I don't know what the numbers for that look like exactly, but even if it's still a natural 20 to hit, you deal 700 damage.

And again, this is the strongest dragon in the game stacked up to level 1 NPCs. And it still loses. Why don't we try something more reasonable, like the CR 8 - 12 range.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 02:25 PM
You forgot Frightful Presence again, which still imposes disadvantage.

Plus, how are you going to surround a dragon with that may soldiers? How are you going to arm them? Why is the dragon standing there like an idiot instead of utilizing its flight? What's stopping the dragon from hitting them with sweeping fire breath? Or from just not fighting them? What about holding a chokepoint like any reasonable intelligent being?

You're assuming nearly impossible conditions.

EDIT: Also, you said 1st level characters for 20th level problems.

An Ancient Red Dragon is a 20th level problem.

A very cunning problem.

Elderand
2015-05-23, 02:34 PM
And even if armies of low level npc can handle monsters, so what ? That's why civilization exist, because armies can handle monsters.
Adventurers aren't the first and only line of defense of civilization. Adventurers are badasses strike team that are worth a whole army on their own and are sent to place where actual armies would be impractical/impossible to use.

Brova
2015-05-23, 02:34 PM
You forgot Frightful Presence again, which still imposes disadvantage.

Actually, I'm assuming that the dragon either doesn't go first or spends its action on something other than frightful presence (which seems to be an action this edition).


Plus, how are you going to surround a dragon with that may soldiers?

Even a partial surround (i.e. a dragon attacking the edge of an army) does about half its hit points with trained soldiers.


How are you going to arm them?

2,700 (soldiers) * 51 (longbow + 1 arrow) = 137,700. IIRC 5e has wealth by level of 20k around 10th, so that looks pretty reasonable for dealing with a problem you'd otherwise need max level PCs for.


Why is the dragon standing there like an idiot instead of utilizing its flight? What's stopping the dragon from hitting them with sweeping fire breath?

To close to actually kill people, it puts itself in danger of repeated volleys and/or readied actions. It can't actually threaten people from outside longbow range, and even the breath weapon is just not fast enough.


Or from just not fighting them?

I mean yes, the dragon could obviously just not try to conquer the kingdom, but at that point there's no adventure.


What about holding a chokepoint like any reasonable intelligent being?

Oh, so you want to trap yourself so the army can wear you down. Sounds tactically sound.


You're assuming nearly impossible conditions.

Yes. And I'm also killing the most powerful dragon in the game with an army of commoners. Seriously, what do stats look like for, say, a hill giant? Or a Beholder? Or maybe a devil in the mid CR range?


A very cunning problem.

And yet, it gets killed by commoners.


Adventurers aren't the first and only line of defense of civilization. Adventurers are badasses strike team that are worth a whole army on their own and are sent to place where actual armies would be impractical/impossible to use.

Well, adventurers aren't actually equal to armies. A CR 10 Fighter goes down to the same army of commoners. Assuming AC 20 and 100 HP it takes around 300 people to kill him with no losses.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 02:49 PM
Why wouldn't the Dragon go first with its greater boost to initiative? It also gets Legendary actions as well.

In addition, COMMONERS DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE MARTIAL WEAPONS!

That's why they're commoners, not soldiers.

How would those soldiers get close enough to the dragon?

Why is the dragon fighting them head on? Why not burn the food supply? Why not make sweeping runs? Why would the soldiers already be mobilized?

How is using a chokepoint trapping yourself? It's not like you can't fly.

You're assuming way too much, that these normal people act like machines, that they can mobilize quickly enough, that they are prepared, that they know when the dragon is coming, that the dragon is an idiot, and that these normal people, with no bonus to initiative, somehow get the first strike on a dragon that can dive bomb them.

Plus, how does it even matter if you can do this using false numbers, bad math, and making the dragon have the tactical skill of a toddler? Is it going to come up in game? Would the characters ever have to worry about this?

Tvtyrant
2015-05-23, 02:52 PM
Well, the first thing you absolutely have to do from 5e is scrap bounded accuracy. That is an idea that does not work at all. The fact that you can kill every monster in the MM with a few dozen horse archers obviates the need for heroes. It breaks the game more than almost any idea I can think of.

See I think this is why it works perfectly. Armies in most editions only exist because of nods to reality, but in 5E they are the best solution to most problems. They don't invalidate adventurers because in the areas where adventurers exist (frontiers, caves, heavy woods, mountains) armies aren't feasible and would be horribly maimed. In games where this isn't the case things like cities are literal fiat, since any major monster could destroy one but only show up when there are sufficient adventurers to stop them.

Take Ethergaunts, which are actively genocidal creatures with innate access to top level magic. Any one of the blacks could destroy a metropolis, but there are still metropolises left because they will only attack where a band of high level adventurers is, and only in sufficient numbers to challenge them. I dislike the amount of mental acrobatics you have to do to make this work, and prefer a world where huge armies are sufficient answers to most threats.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-23, 02:56 PM
I don't see what's so objectionable about having a computer program or app that automates the nitty gritty of DnD. I don't see why it would have to restrict the game's mutability or make it more clumsy, and apparently this is never going to get explained in the thread. It seems quite obvious to me that if Wizards of the Coast wants to introduce more technology into DnD, they'll both want to and know how to do it without compromising on these things.

What I'd like to see from Wizards of the Coast on the technology front is some kind of companion program that comes with a mandatory book like the PHB 1. There is no subscription; the book comes with a unique key that lets you register ownership to an account on WotC's website as a customer of DnD Xth edition (X the variable, not the Roman numeral). Alternately, you can set up a WotC account and then for slightly cheaper than the DnD Xth books, purchase everything in the digital companion online, without any exchange of printed books.

Your "DnD Xth" account then gives you the option to download a program that works on a computer's browser or as a cell phone app. The program presents every book you registered as well as a character generator/manager, a DM manager, and a virtual tabletop.

The character generator/manager should be constantly up to date on errata for the books that you have registered, and every time it updates you should get "patch notes". It should have an ergonomic UI that allows you to build characters like in computer RPG's like Neverwinter and Baldur's Gate, giving you each option to pick as you need them. At the end of the process, the generator should give you a character sheet that is considered a "Legal" DnD character - but you can change the sheet at any time to "Modified" and re-write any words or values on the character sheet, letting you homebrew as you please. You can also customize the appearance of your characters on a 3D model (in the vein of any computer RPG where you can customize your character), which is how they will end up being represented on the virtual tabletop. Each character then goes into a folder with all your other characters, and can be pulled up when you play on the virtual tabletop to interface with it.

The DM manager is simply the DM's analogue to the character manager, and allows DM's to pull monsters from the Monster Manual for use on the virtual tabletop. It should also allow DM's to modify and homebrew monsters by re-writing any value or wording attached to the monsters, or just generate one from scratch. The DM manager might also contain ways for the DM to easily make campaign notes and notes about particular places, NPC's, world events, and so on. You could construct environments in the virtual tabletop using a small, basic number of unique tilesets and doodads, and then store them away as potential locations for use on the virtual tabletop.

The virtual tabletop is simply the program that links the DM manager and the character generator by allowing the DM to create a password-guarded room that players join to play the game. It allows a player to declare his character casts magic missile at a monster on the DM's end, and then the relevant rolls happen instantly, and the DM's profile for the monster instantly updates with the damage dealt. If the DM designed an environment, the virtual tabletop also allows everything to be graphically represented on it, but it should also support a theatre-of-the-mind style without an environment. The virtual tabletop should allow everything to be over-written, re-written, or generally modified on the fly by the DM, or if the DM chooses, he can give special permission for players to modify anything on the virtual tabletop. The virtual tabletop should support webcam and voice chat, and act as a chat room, as well as a Play-by-post style where not everybody is present at everybody else's turn.

Finally, the digital companion should support pick-up games and allow players to find and network with other players. Players looking for a game should be able to set up a profile with their real-life schedule, game style preferences, a description of themself, and so on, for other players to browse. Thus, if you are in a game that could use more players, you could browse free players' profiles and find a random stranger to play with. DMs should also be able to set up a profile for their games that strangers can apply to join.

Brova
2015-05-23, 03:10 PM
Why wouldn't the Dragon go first with its greater boost to initiative? It also gets Legendary actions as well.

Statistics, also it can only kill maybe a hundred people in a round (and that's with the breath weapon).


In addition, COMMONERS DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE MARTIAL WEAPONS!

That's why they're commoners, not soldiers.

You'll notice that I started talking about soldiers. Not because I had to (dragons just can't kill people fast enough even if they're commoners), but because it made the math easier.


How would those soldiers get close enough to the dragon?

That's not the question. The question is "how would the dragon get close enough to the soldiers"? Remember the "no disadvantage" range of the longbow is longer than anything the dragon can do.


Why is the dragon fighting them head on? Why not burn the food supply? Why not make sweeping runs? Why would the soldiers already be mobilized?

Why don't the soldiers kill the dragon in its sleep? Why doesn't the king send his army to wipe out the dragons?


How is using a chokepoint trapping yourself? It's not like you can't fly.

How are you blocking ranged weapons in open air?


Plus, how does it even matter if you can do this using false numbers, bad math, and making the dragon have the tactical skill of a toddler? Is it going to come up in game? Would the characters ever have to worry about this?

Because the game models a world. And if the rules of the game create a world incompatible with the game, it is a flawed game. Sometimes those flaws are fixable (wish, chain binding, most stuff in 3e), but bounded accuracy is a fundamental part of the game.


Take Ethergaunts, which are actively genocidal creatures with innate access to top level magic. Any one of the blacks could destroy a metropolis, but there are still metropolises left because they will only attack where a band of high level adventurers is, and only in sufficient numbers to challenge them. I dislike the amount of mental acrobatics you have to do to make this work, and prefer a world where huge armies are sufficient answers to most threats.

The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers? There are plenty of solutions to the problem you're talking about that don't involve letting a couple thousand nobodies kill everything in the game. For example, maybe high level people just don't care about low level kingdoms. The reason Ethergaunts don't wipe out the kingdom of Thune isn't because they can't, it's because there's nothing there they want.

This is actually a great place to use tiers. Something like this maybe:

Heroic Tier: Gold economy. Heroes in the kingdom. Conan/LoTR type power level.
Paragon Tier: Gold economy/Wish economy. Heroes of the world. Superheroes type power level.
Epic Tier: Wish economy. Heroes of the multiverse. Crazy power level.

It's simple enough to set things up so that the Ethergaunts (an Epic Tier threat) don't kill off the Free City of Greyhawk even though they can. An Ethergaunt can wish for any material wealth, and has slaves who are personally harder core than the entire kingdom. He's got no reason whatsoever to go screw with Heroic Tier people and if he does, he'll do it through intermediaries (who are, fortunately enough, level appropriate for heroic tier).

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 03:22 PM
You said that commoners could kill a dragon and then used soldiers as an example. Bravo for misrepresenting yourself.

The dragon could easily be attacking an army marching out of a constrained space, like a valley, cave or other feature.

Nothing's stopping the dragon from using improvised weapons.

Try getting 2700 soldiers to sneak up to a dragon and manage to surround it. It takes time to surround the dragon, so it would never be dealing with even a large fraction of that at a time.

Also, bounded accuracy isn't a flaw when it only becomes a problem (if you can call it that) in impossible situations. If anything, it makes more sense than 3.x's accuracy mechanic.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-23, 03:30 PM
I fail to understand how it's a bad thing that a group of five heroes can *only* do the job a group of "a few dozen horse archers" or "30 skeletons" or "200 acolytes" or "500 commoners" can do. That's pretty impressive.


The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers?

... I feel like this question is some kind of parody, because I doubt you can ask this question and then somehow not immediately understand the answer.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 03:33 PM
30 skeletons get killed instantly by an Ancient Red Dragon.

30 skeletons is perfectly fair.

Cluedrew
2015-05-23, 03:36 PM
I'll admit my eyes glazed over in this last part. But it gave me one more thing that is left 6th edition.

Being hated because it is not edition Y.

On a more serious note something ... someone I can't find the post ... said is probably the right idea. We don't know what 6th edition will have to bring until 5th has run its course, seen its splat books, been optimized, broken and house ruled by thousands of unwitting play testers or all different sorts.

Sure there is a lot of places D&D could go, high level play, creating a background system, different resource systems, more flavourful ways of representing races, more flexible classes, a working hybrid-class system, a revamped skill system, a balanced swarm/minion system. I think you get the point by now. And these are just the ones I could make off the top of my head.

There are a lot of direction this could go and honestly I think it is too early to say which one will be chosen.

Brova
2015-05-23, 03:45 PM
30 skeletons get killed instantly by an Ancient Red Dragon.

30 skeletons is perfectly fair.

In fairness, you jumped from my claim "minionmancers are powerful" directly to "minionmancers must be able to kill everything with 30 level one minions".

And, as it turns out, I'm still right. The number of commoners you need, while larger than the number of soldiers, is still laughably small compared to the resources available to a kingdom. And you have yet to present any monster other than "ancient red dragon".

I don't have the 5e MM. I can't grab the stats for a level 10 monster or a level 7 monster or a level 15 monster. I can only use the stats people have provided me. And it is still provably true that the resources needed to kill the most powerful dragon in the game don't even represent 1% of what a kingdom in D&D has going on.

Seriously, post HP, AC, and notable offenses of monsters from CR 5/10/15/20. Let's see how a pile of horse archers stack up to them. Let's see if the claim that bounded accuracy is only a problem in the "impossible situation" of a dragon attacking an army holds up. I am wholly unconvinced by an argument that claims a possible victory with skirmish tactics for the strongest monster in the game (I think - max age dragons were in 3e, dunno about 5e) against actual peasants as a defense of bounded accuracy.

Oh, and I think the horse archers are actually pretty good against the dragon depending on relative speeds. The breath weapon and fear have a shorter range than a bow, so my claim might actually just be straight up true, as apposed to minor hyperbole.

EDIT: Not knowing the encounter guidelines, I don't know if this still holds, but in 3e a monster of CR - 8 or lower was not a sufficiently meaningful threat to award XP for. Assuming that's true, you need to be matching that ancient red up against the old blue in arbitrary numbers. I don't imagine that goes quite so well.

EDIT 2: Some math for damage calcs. The damage to a dragon hit only on a 20 by X peasants averaging 7 damage per hit, can be modeled as the sum of the series .35((1 - .7^n)X - 30n) from n = 1 to n = number of rounds of combat. This assumes that peasants with disadvantage do not hit and that the dragon averages 30 kills every round.

oxybe
2015-05-23, 04:10 PM
when talking about edition changes, we need to remember the number 1 motivation: D&D has to survive on it's own two feet in the Hasbro world, not the gaming one (http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?405-WotC-DDI-4E-and-Hasbro-Some-History#.VWDoJkaYGSo). No matter how much money you bring in when compared to Shadowrun, Paranoia, White Wolf, Pathfinder, etc... doesn't matter. D&D is a product own by hasbro, who has to approve where it's money is going to be funneled into.

I'll grab a big quote from that link and bold the important lines:

"...Chuck left after two years and Loren Greenwood, who had been the long time VP of Sales, replaced him in 2004. He was also a visible proponent of the idea that Wizards, and not Boys Toys, should set Hasbro's CCG strategy. Thus when Brian was named COO of the whole company in 2006 and CEO in 2008, Loren had a big problem on his hands. Loren guided the company through the post 3.5e crash of the TRPG market, the loss of the Pokemon franchise, and the unwinding of the Wizards retail strategy. All of this was pretty bitter fruit for hm since he'd been instrumental in building up much of what had to then be torn down. The combination of all these things led to Loren's exit and his replacement by Greg Leeds, who is the current CEO of Wizards.

Sometime around 2005ish, Hasbro made an internal decision to divide its businesses into two categories. Core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and had a growth path towards $100 million annual sales, and Non-Core brands, which didn't.

Under Goldner, the Core Brands would be the tentpoles of the company. They would be exploited across a range of media with an eye towards major motion pictures, following the path Transformers had blazed. Goldner saw what happened to Marvel when they re-oriented their company from a publisher of comic books to a brand building factory (their market capitalization increased by something like 2 billion dollars). He wanted to replicate that at Hasbro.

Core Brands would get the financing they requested for development of their businesses (within reason). Non-Core brands would not. They would be allowed to rise & fall with the overall toy market on their own merits without a lot of marketing or development support. In fact, many Non-Core brands would simply be mothballed - allowed to go dormant for some number of years until the company was ready to take them down off the shelf and try to revive them for a new generation of kids.

At the point of the original Hasbro/Wizards merger a fateful decision was made that laid the groundwork for what happened once Greg took over. Instead of focusing Hasbro on the idea that Wizards of the Coast was a single brand, each of the lines of business in Wizards got broken out and reported to Hasbro as a separate entity. This was driven in large part by the fact that the acquisition agreement specified a substantial post-acquisition purchase price adjustment for Wizards' shareholders on the basis of the sales of non-Magic CCGs (i.e. Pokemon).

This came back to haunt Wizards when Hasbro's new Core/Non-Core strategy came into focus. Instead of being able to say "We're a $100+ million brand, keep funding us as we desire", each of the business units inside Wizards had to make that case separately. So the first thing that happened was the contraction you saw when Wizards dropped new game development and became the "D&D and Magic" company. Magic has no problem hitting the "Core" brand bar, but D&D does. It's really a $25-30 million business, especially since Wizards isn't given credit for the licensing revenue of the D&D computer games..."

The main reason it came back to bite D&D is that when Hasbro bought Wizards, they didn't buy "Wizards the brand that oversaw D&D and Magic" they bought "D&D" and "Magic" and left Wizards to oversee both. D&D couldn't rely on the MtG money for it's survival like it did before.

And that's the important thing: 3rd ed, no matter how successful it was, was not successful enough for post-2005 hasbro. 3rd ed and it's numbers were good for the TTRPG industry, but not Hasbro good. In the eyes of Hasbro: 3rd ed failed. So these developpers who had mouths to feed had to reorganize and revitalize their game and 4th ed was announced. Which again failed to be the $100+ million brand Hasbro was wanting.

And I highly doubt 5th ed to the one to break that streak post the initial year. What I'm going to guess is 3-4 years after it's release 5th ed's sales and product releases will have eased down and the IP is going to be mothballed and re-released a-la My Little Pony: let it rest for a generation to cleanse people's palette for a bit and eventually do a big hubbub and hope it sells.

Brova
2015-05-23, 04:17 PM
@oxybe

Interesting.

Seems like the path forward for D&D would be to get people into the miniatures wargame as a primary source of revenue. Probably a business model focused on that (a la Warhammer) with the RPG stuff as a sideline. Honestly, I kinda hope Hasbro sells the line off to someone who will take "massively successful RPG" even if it's not $50 million a year.

Tvtyrant
2015-05-23, 05:01 PM
The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers? There are plenty of solutions to the problem you're talking about that don't involve letting a couple thousand nobodies kill everything in the game. For example, maybe high level people just don't care about low level kingdoms. The reason Ethergaunts don't wipe out the kingdom of Thune isn't because they can't, it's because there's nothing there they want.

This is actually a great place to use tiers. Something like this maybe:

Heroic Tier: Gold economy. Heroes in the kingdom. Conan/LoTR type power level.
Paragon Tier: Gold economy/Wish economy. Heroes of the world. Superheroes type power level.
Epic Tier: Wish economy. Heroes of the multiverse. Crazy power level.

It's simple enough to set things up so that the Ethergaunts (an Epic Tier threat) don't kill off the Free City of Greyhawk even though they can. An Ethergaunt can wish for any material wealth, and has slaves who are personally harder core than the entire kingdom. He's got no reason whatsoever to go screw with Heroic Tier people and if he does, he'll do it through intermediaries (who are, fortunately enough, level appropriate for heroic tier).

But armies don't solve most problems, just the one of why humans exist at all.

Take an adult dragon. If an entire army of archers met one in the open field, the army would win. Only a dragon holding an idiot ball would do that though. The dragon would attack their now defenseless homes, then destroy the army in a series of night attacks. It would pay the local trolls to ambush the army, it would gather up the local kobold tribes into an alliance and fight the army in hit and run tactics which it orchestrates while it depopulates the country side. By the time the army gets to the cave it is a shattered remnant of its former self, led by broken men who can smell their children burn in the distance. Maybe they manage to kill the dragon, but they lost everything doing so.

Or they can hire a band of professionals to quietly assassinate the dragon in its layer, offering them bribes to augment the dragon's horde. Which choice would you make?

But in all other editions it works like this: The Dragon of Chaosmoon appears over the fully armed and defended capital of Deepcalimportshire, which has somehow stood for 100,000 years. It has 8 mirror images of itself, an AC to high for anyone to hit, and it can stop time. It instantly defeats a major civilization, killing millions. A rogue band of super humans who are strong enough to defeat it but not to even touch its slightly stronger mother appear and kill it within 6 seconds. They have equipment which are equivalent to buying enough land to make an empire, and are capable of each independently destroying any civilization not guarded by a similar band. Calimdeepshireport gives them all of their money in return, which the band uses to buy two new forcefield bands for their casters and a single sword for their fighter. They are called to defend the nearby realm against an invasion of trolls which they effortlessly defeat but which is too strong for the entire kingdom of Notenglandorfrance combined to defeat.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-23, 05:09 PM
Lots of stuff

This in mind, it strikes me that what DnD needs as a series is a better method of monetization much more than a better edition.

NoldorForce
2015-05-23, 07:54 PM
This in mind, it strikes me that what DnD needs as a series is a better method of monetization much more than a better edition.Perhaps. I recall it being said that the best way to make a little money in RPGs is to start with a lot of money, and given the nature of the beast (RPG books ain't cheap to make) something's got to give on the business side.

Psyren
2015-05-23, 07:59 PM
Is the game run by the program?

If it's not, then it's not a digital medium, and only a part of the game is handled digitally.

So at what point do you consider the game to be "run by the program?" All skype does is provide you a way to throw your voice much further than the room you're in. roll20 can do that, and also throw the game grid, and a number of other things that are totally optional. When in your eyes does roll20 D&D stop being "tabletop?" When you automate dice rolls? When you automate initiative? When you automate line of sight? When you automate buff and debuff tracking?

It's an arbitrary and pointless distinction, doubly so if you don't mean it to be derogatory, because then it begs the question of why anyone should care whether you consider one to be "tabletop" or not.


This in mind, it strikes me that what DnD needs as a series is a better method of monetization much more than a better edition.

What they need are better handlers, i.e. the kind of folks who don't consider a $30 million brand a failure. This is a niche hobby, and expecting it to reach Magic's revenue levels - a game with a global competitive scene, speculative collector value and very standardized methods of playing it - is just ridiculous.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 08:27 PM
Tabletop and Video games are arbitrary distinctions? Not really.

A Video game is handled mostly by a digital system.

A Tabletop game is handled mostly by people in a physical system.

That line may be different for some people, but it should be largely the same.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 08:30 PM
The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers? Because the adventurers are there anyway, and it's better to have them go try killing dragons instead of burning down all the taverns in your city (And killing all your guards).

A mid-level adventurer in D&D can absolutely annihilate a town guard with hardly a scratch if it knows what it's doing, based on empirical evidence and actual gameplay. Stop thinking "Superman" and start thinking "Goldeneye"

goto124
2015-05-23, 08:41 PM
In Skype, roll20, etc, it's still a living, breathing human-minded GM who decides what actions the NPCs take, how the world reacts to the PCs, etc.

If a computer does the 'thinking' instead, that's a computer game.

Hiro Protagonest
2015-05-23, 09:07 PM
Tabletop and Video games are arbitrary distinctions? Not really.

A Video game is handled mostly by a digital system.

A Tabletop game is handled mostly by people in a physical system.

That line may be different for some people, but it should be largely the same.

Then why are Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Agricola, and such categorized as board games? The answer is because your definitions aren't what's used by most people to categorize those games.

Wartex1
2015-05-23, 09:11 PM
Then why are Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Agricola, and such categorized as board games? The answer is because your definitions aren't what's used by most people to categorize those games.

Board games are a kind of tabletop game.

Why does that need clarification? That's like asking if an MMO is a video game.

goto124
2015-05-23, 09:40 PM
I thought it was 'Tabletop games are a kind of board game.'

Brova
2015-05-23, 10:00 PM
But armies don't solve most problems, just the one of why humans exist at all.

Take an adult dragon. If an entire army of archers met one in the open field, the army would win. Only a dragon holding an idiot ball would do that though. The dragon would attack their now defenseless homes, then destroy the army in a series of night attacks. It would pay the local trolls to ambush the army, it would gather up the local kobold tribes into an alliance and fight the army in hit and run tactics which it orchestrates while it depopulates the country side. By the time the army gets to the cave it is a shattered remnant of its former self, led by broken men who can smell their children burn in the distance. Maybe they manage to kill the dragon, but they lost everything doing so.

So the solution of "minions are too good" is "get the dragon minions"?


Or they can hire a band of professionals to quietly assassinate the dragon in its layer, offering them bribes to augment the dragon's horde. Which choice would you make?

Well, not if the dragon hires a bunch of kobolds to take potshots at the adventurers.


But in all other editions it works like this: The Dragon of Chaosmoon appears over the fully armed and defended capital of Deepcalimportshire, which has somehow stood for 100,000 years. It has 8 mirror images of itself, an AC to high for anyone to hit, and it can stop time. It instantly defeats a major civilization, killing millions.

Why? That dragon can cast 9th level spells. What does it want from a city of completely normal people? It can wish for anything they could possibly give it. In 3e, powerful people don't meddle in the affairs of mortals not because they are afraid, but because there is nothing they want from them. It's the same reason the PotUS doesn't demand that the military crush Boston - he stands to gain nothing from it.


Because the adventurers are there anyway, and it's better to have them go try killing dragons instead of burning down all the taverns in your city (And killing all your guards).

But why does the city tolerate adventurers? It's not like it needs them, and they are capable of killing large numbers of people. Why do they not get stabbed in their sleep?

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 10:22 PM
But why does the city tolerate adventurers? It's not like it needs them, and they are capable of killing large numbers of people. Why do they not get stabbed in their sleep?
Because it's easier for the city to tolerate adventurers and get discount exterminator services from them than lose half or more of their peacekeeping force and several acres of property in the resulting flames when they try to apprehend adventurers. Moving against an adventurer is very much a "You Lose" proposition. It's better for them to stay in the good graces of an adventuring party, as the Underdark dwellers of Menzoberranzan catastrophically learned when they tried to screw over a group of level 2 adventurers who were just trying to help some Deep Gnomes out.

As for stabbing them in their sleep? Because Adventurers always travel in tight-knit groups of 3-12, with about 1/3rd of their number standing guard at night - even in allegedly 'safe' areas.

Brova
2015-05-23, 10:36 PM
Because it's easier for the city to tolerate adventurers and get discount exterminator services from them than lose half or more of their peacekeeping force and several acres of property in the resulting flames when they try to apprehend adventurers. Moving against an adventurer is very much a "You Lose" proposition. It's better for them to stay in the good graces of an adventuring party, as the Underdark dwellers of Menzoberranzan catastrophically learned when they tried to screw over a group of level 2 adventurers who were just trying to help some Deep Gnomes out.

As for stabbing them in their sleep? Because Adventurers always travel in tight-knit groups of 3-12, with about 1/3rd of their number standing guard at night - even in allegedly 'safe' areas.

You are drastically overestimating individual combat effectiveness. If you run my model, it takes something like 800 guys with bows to kill the red dragon with some 200ish casualties. That's a very favorable trade for that unit and a very small unit size. And it's against someone super hard core. The odds are just not in favor of the adventurers.

Hawkstar
2015-05-23, 10:48 PM
You are drastically overestimating individual combat effectiveness. If you run my model, it takes something like 800 guys with bows to kill the red dragon with some 200ish casualties. That's a very favorable trade for that unit and a very small unit size. And it's against someone super hard core. The odds are just not in favor of the adventurers.That is 199-198 casualties too many. Absolutely unacceptable losses, not a favorable trade at all.

If you run an actual game instead of a baseless model, you find that the model's actually completely damn useless.

Furthermore - NO edition of D&D handles mass combat on the scale you're trying to force it into. With a large enough group, you end up with efficiency-detractors. (And if Frightful Presence goes off, everyone dies - Those who fail the save are picked off at the dragon's leisure. Those who make it are trampled to death by those who didn't).

You should play more Goldeneye.

Brova
2015-05-23, 11:00 PM
That is 199-198 casualties too many. Absolutely unacceptable losses, not a favorable trade at all.

You do understand that 200 casualties is seriously an order of magnitude lower than many medieval battles, right?


If you run an actual game instead of a baseless model, you find that the model's actually completely damn useless.

Yes, when you run actual games, people don't do things that break the game. Duh. People play a game because they want to have a good time, not because they want to poke at the system until it falls apart. But that doesn't mean the system won't fall apart. 3.5's wish is always broken, even if it's not used to become The Wish. 5e's bounded accuracy is always broken, even if its not used to kill an ancient dragon with commoners.


Furthermore - NO edition of D&D handles mass combat on the scale you're trying to force it into. With a large enough group, you end up with efficiency-detractors. (And if Frightful Presence goes off, everyone dies - Those who fail the save are picked off at the dragon's leisure. Those who make it are trampled to death by those who didn't).

Actually, 3e deals with this surprisingly well. For one thing, the dragon has AC "nope" even against people with actual training. For another thing, the dragon has DR "nope"/magic. For a final thing, the dragon has frightful presence that triggers automatically and actually incapacitates people. Compare that to a 5e dragon with barely enough AC to no sell peasants, no DR whatsoever, and frightful presence that takes an action, offers repeated saves, and doesn't actually incapacitate (just disadvantage, apparently).

mephnick
2015-05-23, 11:18 PM
Why would you send 200 subjects to their deaths when you could pay a few mercenaries to kill the dragon?

squiggit
2015-05-23, 11:57 PM
Personally I find 5e's progression curve to be a little uninspiring. I get bounded accuracy is there to make the math easier, but it still makes things feel a lot less epic as you progress

Also feel like 5e backslides a bit on caster martial issues.

And customization issues, which is also slightly a facet of caster/martial because spellcasters can customize reasonably well. Generally feel like there aren't a lot of moving parts when making a new character though, especially if feats are off the table.

5e also oddly enough doubles down on 4e's issues with stats. In 5e most classes have a primary stat and then want a decent con score. gishes, half casters and monks/battlemasters have a secondary stat. And that's it.

Also a question of longevity for a system so ... unmeaty. But who knows.

Sith_Happens
2015-05-24, 12:38 AM
And your comment about warlocks shows you much you know... So no, you are wrong, period.


Err - this shows how much you know... So no, you are wrong, period.

Sounds to me like the D&D edition most like WoW is 3.X, in that both are full of people arguing with each other endlessly over whose personal experience is "right" and who's a big fat moron.:smalltongue:


worst of all, 4e can't give you that authentic barrens chat experience of pure stupidity that makes you want to whack out your own brain with a lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

It can with the wrong right group.:smallwink:


What on earth does "the line from a tabletop game to video game" entail?

Given that they're called video games, I'm pretty sure the line lies at "Does it have a graphics engine."


Again, did I say that video games were bad? Roll20 is using a tabletop system as a video game, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Then what are you arguing about? If being more like a video game isn't in and of itself a bad thing then who cares where the line between "video game" and "tabletop game" is?:smallconfused:


The fact that the mechanics don't support that. Because if he closes to use his breath weapon, he dies. Horribly.

How is your army being everywhere at once? If 4000 soldiers gather in an open field hoping to fight the dragon, the dragon is just going to fly right over them and torch the nearest city, farm, or other strategic resource. By the time the army gets there there will be nothing left but ashes and the dragon will have already moved on to the next target.

If a dragon wants to ravage or conquer a kingdom, it ravages or conquers the kingdom itself. The kingdom's military will eventually either scatter, submit to the dragon's rule, or fall into anarchy.


[Snip]

Someone get this man a team of programmers.


Why don't the soldiers kill the dragon in its sleep? Why doesn't the king send his army to wipe out the dragons?

How are more than a dozen or so soldiers at a time fighting the dragon inside its lair? Any dragon savvy enough to survive to the age we're talking about in the first place is going to live somewhere with at least one choke point that any invaders have to make it through, and that choke point won't be the kind that an arbitrary number of people can shoot at it through at once.


The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers?

Plenty of reasons:

1. The threat is hanging out somewhere that an army won't fit.

2. No one who cares about the threat has an army.

3. The number of casualties expected to result from sending an army after the threat makes that solution unpalatable to whoever's in charge of the army.

4. The nature of the threat is such that whoever's in charge of the army expects retaliation should they be linked to the initial response (adventurers are deniable).

5. The army's discipline is shaky enough that sending them after the threat would cause too many headaches, or worst case scenario they straight-up say "Hell no, get some adventurers to do it."


In Skype, roll20, etc, it's still a living, breathing human-minded GM who decides what actions the NPCs take, how the world reacts to the PCs, etc.

If a computer does the 'thinking' instead, that's a computer game.

I like this definition.


Why? That dragon can cast 9th level spells. What does it want from a city of completely normal people? It can wish for anything they could possibly give it.

Even fear and worship?

...Okay, yes, but it has to get really creative and even then it's just not the same as subjugating an honest-to-goodness, naturally-grown city.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-24, 01:26 AM
Sounds to me like the D&D edition most like WoW is 3.X, in that both are full of people arguing with each other endlessly over whose personal experience is "right" and who's a big fat moron.:smalltongue:

Sounds to me like gitp is most like a typical internet forum where people prefer to make nonsensical accusations rather than address arguments that deal with facts.

Tvtyrant
2015-05-24, 02:49 AM
Actually, 3e deals with this surprisingly well. For one thing, the dragon has AC "nope" even against people with actual training. For another thing, the dragon has DR "nope"/magic. For a final thing, the dragon has frightful presence that triggers automatically and actually incapacitates people. Compare that to a 5e dragon with barely enough AC to no sell peasants, no DR whatsoever, and frightful presence that takes an action, offers repeated saves, and doesn't actually incapacitate (just disadvantage, apparently).

See I beg to differ. You still haven't explained why there are any humans left at all in 3.X.

Say we have some nice, low level trolls. How does any society deal with them? Happen upon a party of super soldiers with nothing better to do, with no thought for their own safety, and who don't feel like simply ruling society every single time? As opposed to "It sucks to lose a dozen people fighting a troll, so we get some outsiders to try for us."

Also 10% casualties is historically considered atrocious, and by 30% you are guaranteed a rout. Any monster that is going to deal 30% casualties before it dies is going to win, because the army is going to break. And that is if it stupid enough to fight an army instead of destroy its supply train or attack the place it just left undefended. Armies can't remain in the field indefinitely either, gathering troops to fight a dragon just means it waits until nightfall and torches their homes.

Brova
2015-05-24, 07:29 AM
Why would you send 200 subjects to their deaths when you could pay a few mercenaries to kill the dragon?

How much do you think that a medieval monarch thinks their subjects lives are worth? 1 GP? 10 GP? 100 GP? Life in the era D&D emulates was cheap, and there's not any particular reason to think that the reward for ~20th level adventurers would be low enough to justify spending it to save those lives.


See I beg to differ. You still haven't explained why there are any humans left at all in 3.X.

Say we have some nice, low level trolls. How does any society deal with them? Happen upon a party of super soldiers with nothing better to do, with no thought for their own safety, and who don't feel like simply ruling society every single time? As opposed to "It sucks to lose a dozen people fighting a troll, so we get some outsiders to try for us."

3e's CR math works out to having people stop being threatened by the local militia right at the point where they can go out into the planes to beat up efreet for wishes. It's surprisingly (and I assume unintentionally) elegant. Trolls are also the origin of the term "closet troll" - something threatening in a dungeon but not if you have room to maneuver and use ranged attacks.

But yes, 3e does have critters that low level mooks can't deal with. Even without the ability to go all shadow over the sun, you can't kill a shadow with any number of level 1 warriors. And that's a good thing. It gives a reason for adventurers to exist and for people to not just use the local army for everything.


Also 10% casualties is historically considered atrocious, and by 30% you are guaranteed a rout. Any monster that is going to deal 30% casualties before it dies is going to win, because the army is going to break.

Those numbers are from solving backwards for killing the dragon in 5 rounds. If you were to put in an input of 2000 or 3000 soldiers, you could kill the dragon in a round or two with minimal losses. And the numbers aren't going to be nearly that bad for anything less threatening than "the most powerful dragon in the world".


And that is if it stupid enough to fight an army instead of destroy its supply train or attack the place it just left undefended. Armies can't remain in the field indefinitely either, gathering troops to fight a dragon just means it waits until nightfall and torches their homes.

And what stops the dragon from doing the same thing against adventurers? Also, it is an important part of the genera D&D emulates for dragons to destroy armies by bathing them in fire. Scenes like Smaug's devastation of Laketown or the Kingdom Under the Mountain can't happen if he can be killed by a couple hundred dudes with bows. Failing to allow that is like writing a game that tries to simulate action movies, but gives the optimal tactic in Die Hard as "just send in the police".


1. The threat is hanging out somewhere that an army won't fit.

So camp the entrance? Or are there rules that allow monsters to do something (i.e. chain binding) from the comfort of their lairs that upgrades their threat level.


2. No one who cares about the threat has an army.

Why are the adventurers going after it then? Also, "army" is seriously the wrong word. It's like 1000 guys to kill an ancient dragon. What do you think the numbers are for a dragon that is just adult, or for a pack of ogres?


3. The number of casualties expected to result from sending an army after the threat makes that solution unpalatable to whoever's in charge of the army.

4. The nature of the threat is such that whoever's in charge of the army expects retaliation should they be linked to the initial response (adventurers are deniable).

5. The army's discipline is shaky enough that sending them after the threat would cause too many headaches, or worst case scenario they straight-up say "Hell no, get some adventurers to do it."

Again, the math doesn't support any of that. Casualties are always low in absolute terms, low in relative terms when army sizes approach a tenth of army sizes from that period, and happen largely because dragons have an AoE attack. Retaliation is impossible, because nothing threatens armies of low level minions. Discipline is not likely to be a concern here. You're looking at incredibly low casualties and some very decent loot for less than a minute's work. Who the hell is breaking under those conditions?

Psyren
2015-05-24, 08:18 AM
In Skype, roll20, etc, it's still a living, breathing human-minded GM who decides what actions the NPCs take, how the world reacts to the PCs, etc.

If a computer does the 'thinking' instead, that's a computer game.

This is an actually sensible place to draw the line, because it depends on whether a human or computer is doing the actual decision-making, rather than something useless and arbitrary like whether the GM's voice is reaching the player's eardrums purely through the gases filling the room or whether it has to go through a phone line first.

In particular, it allows for the computer to assist the GM with tracking the numbers, without it ceasing to be a tabletop game.



Given that they're called video games, I'm pretty sure the line lies at "Does it have a graphics engine."

Skype has a graphics engine, used to render the video chats. Is Skype a video game?

As long as a human is making the decisions for the world/NPCs in real time, it is a tabletop game, regardless of the medium you use (and yes, the presence/absence of a table as well.)

Hawkstar
2015-05-24, 11:24 AM
How much do you think that a medieval monarch thinks their subjects lives are worth? 1 GP? 10 GP? 100 GP? Life in the era D&D emulates was cheap, and there's not any particular reason to think that the reward for ~20th level adventurers would be low enough to justify spending it to save those lives.Adventurers pay for themselves. You don't need a massive reward - merely entitle them to salvage/looting rights for their kills. Even then - I'd say an average monarch would rate a peasant's life at ~1,000 GP, varying by career, age, and job, given the large investment in time and food, and materials to raise them. And, 20th-level adventurers in 5e don't require the same stupidly exorbitant prices they did in 3e.


3e's CR math works out to having people stop being threatened by the local militia right at the point where they can go out into the planes to beat up efreet for wishes. It's surprisingly (and I assume unintentionally) elegant. Trolls are also the origin of the term "closet troll" - something threatening in a dungeon but not if you have room to maneuver and use ranged attacks.Except trolls are fast, and regenerate, so massed low-level ranged weapons are lolnope against them.


But yes, 3e does have critters that low level mooks can't deal with. Even without the ability to go all shadow over the sun, you can't kill a shadow with any number of level 1 warriors. And that's a good thing. It gives a reason for adventurers to exist and for people to not just use the local army for everything.No, it's a terrible thing because it doesn't give a reason for humans/society to exist. In a world where low-level mooks cannot do anything, low-level mooks don't exist. In 3.5, in order for the world to work, the average soldier has to be Level 8. Increasing the strength of monsters doesn't make ARmies go away - it just makes the price-per-soldier increase.



Those numbers are from solving backwards for killing the dragon in 5 rounds. If you were to put in an input of 2000 or 3000 soldiers, you could kill the dragon in a round or two with minimal losses. And the numbers aren't going to be nearly that bad for anything less threatening than "the most powerful dragon in the world".How are the 2,000-3,000 soldiers dealing with the 5,000 kobolds the dragon has serving and willing to die for it? Adventurers deal with it through strategic insertion.


And what stops the dragon from doing the same thing against adventurers? Also, it is an important part of the genera D&D emulates for dragons to destroy armies by bathing them in fire. Scenes like Smaug's devastation of Laketown or the Kingdom Under the Mountain can't happen if he can be killed by a couple hundred dudes with bows. Failing to allow that is like writing a game that tries to simulate action movies, but gives the optimal tactic in Die Hard as "just send in the police".In case you didn't notice, only a few soldiers were ever engaging Smaug at a time - the rest were panicking. D&D has the 'problem' of not handling how people react in large groups. Its combat system breaks down horribly once more than ~30 soldiers appear on either side, and people start slacking.




So camp the entrance? Or are there rules that allow monsters to do something (i.e. chain binding) from the comfort of their lairs that upgrades their threat level. FWOOSH out the entrance.



Why are the adventurers going after it then? Also, "army" is seriously the wrong word. It's like 1000 guys to kill an ancient dragon. What do you think the numbers are for a dragon that is just adult, or for a pack of ogres?Because it's fun (To the psychopaths that are adventurers), and pays more than soldiering or digging dirt.


Again, the math doesn't support any of that. Casualties are always low in absolute terms, low in relative terms when army sizes approach a tenth of army sizes from that period, and happen largely because dragons have an AoE attack. Retaliation is impossible, because nothing threatens armies of low level minions. Discipline is not likely to be a concern here. You're looking at incredibly low casualties and some very decent loot for less than a minute's work. Who the hell is breaking under those conditions?Sure there's a threat to armies of low-level minions - Armies of low-level minions. Which dragons have. Also - your calculations fail to account for the fact that each low-level mook is a person, not just a number.

In fact, there's a good chance that, when you march your army out to face the dragon, several squads aim their bows at their 'buddy' archers, kill them when they try to shoot the dragon, then give each other the Open Hand Salute (HAIL TIAMAT!)

mephnick
2015-05-24, 12:19 PM
Also, historically, barons or monarchs who threw civilian lives away for no reason tended to end up without heads or intestines. The king with an iron fist that is never questioned has no bearing in reality. Monarchs constantly had to heed public opinion in times of war, or raising of taxes. Yes, sometimes civilians demanded war as much as the monarchs did, (Rulers who desired peace during the 100 Years War were often labeled as "soft", even by those who would be conscripted into the war.) but generally sending your subjects into a vanity war against a rival (or dragon) ended up badly. Usurpers raised by an unhappy populace are all over the historical record. In a world that actually has adventurers on call, you'd be stupid not to pay them.

Hawkstar
2015-05-24, 12:29 PM
In a world that actually has adventurers on call, you'd be stupid not to pay them.
Especially if they get bored and decide to take the throne by force, and All The King's Soldiers, when called to defend their king from the adventurers, instead say "Nope. I'm not dying against him. HAIL TO THE NEW KING! same as the old one"

Cluedrew
2015-05-24, 02:02 PM
NO edition of D&D handles mass combat on the scale you're trying to force it into.

Hey something else left for 6th edition. Although it is a good example of design focus. By that I mean the designers could create large army scale warfare rules, but D&D has never been about that. D&D is about a group of 4-8 or so extremely gifted individual wandering around and saving the world. Mass combat is only part of that as a backdrop and so (usually) doesn't need any special resolution rules, plot just gives the result.

Which is also why the result of the "200 commoners vs. an ancient dragon" battle doesn't turn out the way it narratively should. I actually read a D&D novelization where a situation like this happened. There where not quite as many commoners but they had better tactics and resources and the dragon would have probably only been adult.

It did not go well for the commoners.

Later in the story, one "adventure" solos the dragon with his sword and two magic items. That is the type of story D&D is designed to tell. And although this story was not one of my favourites, it was a lot more interesting than the army roving the country side looking for the dragon. Which by the way there were reasons for in the story. The dragon had a hand in some of those actually.


In 3.5, in order for the world to work, the average soldier has to be Level 8.Alight, you got me. Please elaborate, why does everything break if the average soldier has real low level (or is even level less)?

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-24, 02:58 PM
Alight, you got me. Please elaborate, why does everything break if the average soldier has real low level (or is even level less)?

Natural defenses of mid-level monsters mean they can take on an arbitrary number of level 1 NPCs. This means no amount of low-level characters is a sufficient defence against them. Which raises the question of how can human(oid) civilization even exist, because the monsters should be able to kill it in the cradle.

Good examples: anything that can turn incorporeal. Shadows are a classic example.

Cluedrew
2015-05-24, 05:33 PM
Thanks Frozen_Feet.

When you start game-afing the story world things brake. Here the issue is that the number of monsters that must exist for the adventures to find and fight them all is ludicrous compared to the number that appear in most stories. Even ones set in D&D settings have way less (of the ones I've read, not including stories that parody the game itself).

Of course, if you do want to explain how civilization has not died out the answer is probably a constant steam of adventurers.

Brova
2015-05-24, 07:15 PM
Adventurers pay for themselves. You don't need a massive reward - merely entitle them to salvage/looting rights for their kills. Even then - I'd say an average monarch would rate a peasant's life at ~1,000 GP, varying by career, age, and job, given the large investment in time and food, and materials to raise them. And, 20th-level adventurers in 5e don't require the same stupidly exorbitant prices they did in 3e.

Do you even opportunity costs bro? Whether it's a reward for killing the dragon, or loot from the dragon's horde the monarch is still down whatever appropriate treasure. Also, I don't actually know what "appropriate treasure" looks like in 5e for an ancient red dragon.

Also, a note on losses. The only reason the dragon kills more than 12 people is a breath weapon and frightful presence. If we imagine a monster that traded those for bigger numbers (or the same numbers but being lower level), you could kill it without losing more than 5 people.


Except trolls are fast, and regenerate, so massed low-level ranged weapons are lolnope against them.

Trolls move as fast as a human and slower than a horse. You can kill one by kiting it until it falls over, then lighting it on fire.


No, it's a terrible thing because it doesn't give a reason for humans/society to exist. In a world where low-level mooks cannot do anything, low-level mooks don't exist. In 3.5, in order for the world to work, the average soldier has to be Level 8. Increasing the strength of monsters doesn't make ARmies go away - it just makes the price-per-soldier increase.

What? Low level mooks do all sorts of things in 3e. For one thing, they hold territory and enforce laws. While it is certainly true that a band of 9th level adventurers can topple essentially any mortal authority in 3e, they can't actually enforce their own laws without support. And low level minions can also deal with a big percentage of threats, including essentially everything you'd actually find in the wild.

As far as things like shadows go, I don't really see the problem. It's a threat that actually requires adventurers to solve - implying that there would be actual adventurers.


How are the 2,000-3,000 soldiers dealing with the 5,000 kobolds the dragon has serving and willing to die for it? Adventurers deal with it through strategic insertion.

Again, you've solved the problem of low level minions being too good by adding minions to both sides. That's not a solution in any real sense. And remember that adventurers are vulnerable to this problem as well. A couple dozen (I don't know exact numbers, I haven't crunched PC side math) kobolds in the throne room of the dragon add a massive boost to the threat level for PCs.


In case you didn't notice, only a few soldiers were ever engaging Smaug at a time - the rest were panicking. D&D has the 'problem' of not handling how people react in large groups. Its combat system breaks down horribly once more than ~30 soldiers appear on either side, and people start slacking.

You're totally right, D&D doesn't model people panicking when they encounter a dragon. Wait, no that's just 5e. 3e has frightful presence proc "whenever the dragon attacks, charges, or flies overhead." And it sends people running in terror. So your complaint about D&D failing applies only to the edition you're defending. Own Goal!


Because it's fun (To the psychopaths that are adventurers), and pays more than soldiering or digging dirt.

You know what else is fun? Being wealthy. You know what people will pay you to do? Actual magic. That means like half of classes just don't adventure at all. Now, 3e has a genuine motivation to adventure - real ultimate power. But in 5e you never get harder core than a mob of peasants, so why would you risk your hide?

Djinn_in_Tonic
2015-05-24, 07:32 PM
So wait...why is the ability of an entire army to kill off a Dragon or Adventuring Party a problem again? It's an army. They're historically hard to organize, expensive to maintain...but also very effective at killing things smaller than themselves that are made of things that can be cut with weapons or crushed with siege weaponry.

Dragons seem to fall into that category, unless they have some VERY high levels of magical protection.

I fail to see a problem here. If you manage to mobilize and arm that much of a population (given that 5e seems to have more medieval-esque populations than 3.5e, to my knowledge) and then keep them organized, focused, and in formation against a single major enemy, I don't see the issue. That feat alone is almost as impressive as just fighting the Dragon yourself, and I'd totally be okay if my players decided to go that route.

Anlashok
2015-05-24, 07:53 PM
So wait...why is the ability of an entire army to kill off a Dragon or Adventuring Party a problem again? It's an army. They're historically hard to organize, expensive to maintain...but also very effective at killing things smaller than themselves that are made of things that can be cut with weapons or crushed with siege weaponry.
No one mentioned siege weaponry. It's just a pile of nameless cannon fodder throwing themselves at a dragon until it dies. Remember, a small army against a dragon might sound fine, but this is also the most extreme example possible, taking the strongest monsters in the book and pitting them against the weakest and least effective opposition possible. When you start giving those mooks tactics and support and put them against anything else in the monster manual suddenly you're left wondering why there's even anything for an adventurer to do in the first place.

Brova
2015-05-24, 07:56 PM
So wait...why is the ability of an entire army to kill off a Dragon or Adventuring Party a problem again? It's an army. They're historically hard to organize, expensive to maintain...but also very effective at killing things smaller than themselves that are made of things that can be cut with weapons or crushed with siege weaponry.

It's not an army. The scale is seriously "fairly large high school" and the casualties against anything without an AoE are on the order of one class of high schoolers. In 5e a dragon is seriously about as much of a threat as a crazy guy on a rampage is today. And while the deaths from crazy people on rampages are tragically high, they are not enough to get us to radically rethink society. I see no reason for that to be particularly different in the world of 5e.

There's also the problem that a dragon not being able to attack an army with out fear is out of genre. Both for fantasy in general and for D&D in particular. Dragons are killed by lone knights, not by massed armies. A game where the reverse is true is just as out of genre for fantasy as a game emulating Mad Max where the chase rules encourage you to ride a lama.


No one mentioned siege weaponry. It's just a pile of nameless cannon fodder throwing themselves at a dragon until it dies. Remember, a small army against a dragon might sound fine, but this is also the most extreme example possible, taking the strongest monsters in the book and pitting them against the weakest and least effective opposition possible. When you start giving those mooks tactics and support and put them against anything else in the monster manual suddenly you're left wondering why there's even anything for an adventurer to do in the first place.

Also worth noting that a dragon is the monster best equipped to solve the problem of "army of mooks." It flies, has an AoE disable, and has a breath weapon. 90%+ of the casualties from killing a dragon come from it breathing fire on people. Monsters like the Grey Render or Dire Bears don't do that, and fare even worse against an army of minions.

Hiro Protagonest
2015-05-24, 08:23 PM
...Because monsters are just going to sit out in an open field or attack the town directly, where siege weapons can be effectively employed?

Troll raiders preying on a well-traveled but long road through a forest. A blue dragon that lives in a dormant volcano near a coast and raids ships. Tucker's Kobolds.

Commoners and warriors can optimize (gamey) and employ tactics (not so gamey). But when push comes to shove, monsters can too.

Brova
2015-05-24, 08:36 PM
Troll raiders preying on a well-traveled but long road through a forest. A blue dragon that lives in a dormant volcano near a coast and raids ships. Tucker's Kobolds.

I haven't seen the math on trolls, I wouldn't know. The dragon's success depends on a number of factors, mostly its ability to prevent people from hitting it in its lair. Tucker's Kobolds are threatening because you have to come to them, if they actually come out of the lair to threaten the kingdom they lose any marginal advantage over regular kobolds.

YossarianLives
2015-05-24, 09:12 PM
I just came up with an idea that I think I'm going to incorporate into my D&D setting.

If most soldiers are a pack of first or second level scrubs that can't even properly defend their city from fairly low level threats like shadows why are they trusted to defend their city from the many dangers of a high-magic world?
What if, instead of a city having 100 low-level warriors to serve as it's protectors it had 5 mid-level adventurers.

Cluedrew
2015-05-24, 09:18 PM
The problem is there are two very valid concerns that are playing against each other.
Common folk have to defend themselves from the monsters of the world so it makes sense why civilization hasn't been wiped out.
Common folk can't be able to defend themselves so there is a reason adventures exist.
There probably isn't a perfect equilibrium between these two although, bringing us around to the main topic again, 6th is welcome to try.

Milo v3
2015-05-24, 09:24 PM
Hey something else left for 6th edition. Although it is a good example of design focus. By that I mean the designers could create large army scale warfare rules, but D&D has never been about that. D&D is about a group of 4-8 or so extremely gifted individual wandering around and saving the world. Mass combat is only part of that as a backdrop and so (usually) doesn't need any special resolution rules, plot just gives the result.
Actually, now that I think about this... Both 3rd and 5th edition have mass combat rules. So even that has been covered.

Talakeal
2015-05-24, 09:42 PM
Are skeletons in 5e really affected by frightful presence? That seems very odd for a mindless undead minion. I thought 5e was pulling away from blanket effects like that?

Brova
2015-05-24, 09:49 PM
The problem is there are two very valid concerns that are playing against each other.
Common folk have to defend themselves from the monsters of the world so it makes sense why civilization hasn't been wiped out.
Common folk can't be able to defend themselves so there is a reason adventures exist.
There probably isn't a perfect equilibrium between these two although, bringing us around to the main topic again, 6th is welcome to try.

There are some things you can nudge to make that work. First, if adventuring actually made you super hardcore people would have a reasonable risk/reward dynamic for going into the Crypts of Blood or the Screaming Woods or the Burning Mountains. Second, if there were hardcore critters you could make at home, people would have a motivation to go bust down the towers of dark wizards. Third, if monsters that commoners can't deal with (like shadows) largely stay stationary, you can justify using adventurers to clear them out while still having civilization.

My preferred solution is a "points of darkness" approach. Basically, most of the world is basically okay. You've got some dire bears and giant lions out there, but nothing civilization destroying. However, certain sites periodically generate monsters that you send heroes to deal with. On top of that, mid to high level people's incentives line up to have them spending time in the City of Brass (where the average citizen is CR 8).

Really, something like 4e's tiers, but executed well, would have solved a lot of the weirdness about D&D. That forces people out of concepts like "sword guy", gives a clear place for kingdom management to come online, sets up magic items well, and delineates various groups into appropriate areas (obviously, you have to be careful to avoid WOW style "level zones").

Hawkstar
2015-05-24, 10:04 PM
There are some things you can nudge to make that work. First, if adventuring actually made you super hardcore people would have a reasonable risk/reward dynamic for going into the Crypts of Blood or the Screaming Woods or the Burning Mountains. Second, if there were hardcore critters you could make at home, people would have a motivation to go bust down the towers of dark wizards. Third, if monsters that commoners can't deal with (like shadows) largely stay stationary, you can justify using adventurers to clear them out while still having civilization.I'm not sure how being worth 20 skilled and hardy men in a fight isn't "Super Hardcore".

Brova
2015-05-24, 10:11 PM
I'm not sure how being worth 20 skilled and hardy men in a fight isn't "Super Hardcore".

How many dudes with bows guns is the Hulk worth? Thor? Iron Man? Gaius Sextus? Martian Manhunter?

Hawkstar
2015-05-24, 10:16 PM
How many dudes with bows guns is the Hulk worth? Thor? Iron Man? Gaius Sextus? Martian Manhunter?

Quite a few, but not infinite.

Sindeloke
2015-05-25, 03:22 AM
How many dudes with bows guns is the Hulk worth? Thor? Iron Man? Gaius Sextus? Martian Manhunter?

Idk who Sextus is, but those other guys are all CR 30+, and that's in 3e terms. Odinson even has divine rank and J'onn might as well, if you let him use his telepathy and incorporeality to its full potential. If you want to model 5e power levels with superheroes, you're looking at Cap, Jessica Drew, Spidey or Black Canary (with Cry). Badarses every one, sure, but none would replace a well-trained militia.

Basically you can send a platoon or you can send SpecForce. Either way the problem gets dealt with. It's just a matter of how fast and quiet you want it done, what secondary objectives are involved, and what you're willing to accept in terms of casualties. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-25, 07:23 AM
It's not an army. The scale is seriously "fairly large high school" and the casualties against anything without an AoE are on the order of one class of high schoolers. In 5e a dragon is seriously about as much of a threat as a crazy guy on a rampage is today.

Uh huh.

You should've realized when you made that comparison that the "crazy guys on a rampage" who get caught or killed are amateurs. When you look at actual military personnel or worst animal serial killers in history, you'd find they've destroyed whole villages without dying, and they were ground-bound.

Attacking a gathering of few hundred people armed with slings on an open plain is tactically sub-optimal to a dragon. It can fly higher than people can shoot. If it spots such a gathering, it has no reason to go there.

Instead, it can (dependings on subtype) ambush caravans from a bog, swim to ships from below and sink them or fly so close to the waterline it can't be killed before it can set the ship on fire, attack villages in forested areas where it can use trees as cover, or employ any other of movement strategies where there won't be line of sight to it from myriad archers.

This way, it can destroy amounts of people comparable to a "high school class" again and again with little to no risk to itself. And when people start to get a hint, it can fly off to the next area. It is faster than people on foot or horseback. It can get to the next victim ahead of the news.

Nevermind the destruction it can cause to unguarded targets or livestock. Which there will be a lot of in a rural environment whenever people flock together for safety. A dragon can trivially keep swathes of countryside in check if all it has to face are commoners or low-level soldiers. And because cities depend on resources flowing in from the countryside, it can destroy one without ever flying within visual range of it.

In real life, a hundred people with slings can stone the largest man-eating crocodile to death. An infantry platoon can drop a combat heli with their assault rifles. Yet these happen pretty damn rarely, as even the crocodile is smart enough to not go where masses of people can fling rocks at it. A dragon isn't a "crazy guy on a rampage". It's an intelligent flying predator. It is closer in threat level to a fighter plane with a skilled pilot.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2015-05-25, 08:01 AM
It is closer in threat level to a fighter plane with a skilled pilot.

Who can still be brought down by five hundred guys with rifles.

Brova: You're using numbers in the hundreds to talk about amassing the common folk. Which is a little odd, given the medieval-esque setting of D&D. 13-14th century England had a population density of about 40 per square mile. A major city might have had 110,000 people in it, while your average village (even a decently sized one) would have been likely under 400 people. You'd gut the livelihood of a large swath of land every time you attempted such a thing.

Bear in mind that a fair number of these people would have been children or infirm. We'll assume that the medieval world of D&D considers women the equal of men in terms of warfare, so our numbers look better than those of 14th century Europe.

We're still looking at a large amount of effort to mobilize enough people to fight a dragon...and a larger amount to arm said people and keep them together. Again, this isn't something your average village could organize for itself -- this sort of coordination requires an actual leader, which is precisely the role that the PCs SHOULD fall into.

Brova
2015-05-25, 08:38 AM
Okay, can we talk about anything other than the literal best possible case for bounded accuracy? Yes, if the monster has flight, an AoE attack, and the largest level gap in the game, it can do kind of okay. Even good if it uses harassment tactics (which I should note, are used against a superior force - not exactly how you'd describe a dragon and a bunch of commoners). But seriously, that is the best possible case. What if we look at the red dragon versus some younger dragons? What if we look at commoners versus a pack of giants?


You should've realized when you made that comparison that the "crazy guys on a rampage" who get caught or killed are amateurs. When you look at actual military personnel or worst animal serial killers in history, you'd find they've destroyed whole villages without dying, and they were ground-bound.

And did that at any point convince governments that an appropriate solution was "surrender sovereignty to armed maniacs"?


Attacking a gathering of few hundred people armed with slings on an open plain is tactically sub-optimal to a dragon. It can fly higher than people can shoot. If it spots such a gathering, it has no reason to go there.

Except it's not. It's not in the source material (Smaug doesn't worry about the defenders of the Kingdom Under the Mountain), it's not in earlier editions of D&D. You can certainly construct a world where that statement is true, but that world is not D&D.

The source material for fantasy does include people who get killed by armies (Boromir), but it also includes people who can kill hundreds of elite warriors in a heartbeat (Gaius Sextus), and dragons that slaughter armies (Game of Thrones, LoTR). A vital part of the genre involves people who are worth hundreds, thousands, or even millions of warriors. Not capping out at "can maybe beat 2,000 peasants if it fights dirty".


Brova: You're using numbers in the hundreds to talk about amassing the common folk. Which is a little odd, given the medieval-esque setting of D&D. 13-14th century England had a population density of about 40 per square mile. A major city might have had 110,000 people in it, while your average village (even a decently sized one) would have been likely under 400 people. You'd gut the livelihood of a large swath of land every time you attempted such a thing.

You'd also gut a dragon. 400 people is going to do a big number on the dragon. I don't know how long term healing works in 5e, but the dragon is looking at resting for a couple of days to recover from torching a village of peasants.


Bear in mind that a fair number of these people would have been children or infirm. We'll assume that the medieval world of D&D considers women the equal of men in terms of warfare, so our numbers look better than those of 14th century Europe.

Perhaps the game should model that then. Maybe by allowing those people to fall off of the RNG. Except it can't, because bounded accuracy.

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-25, 08:48 AM
Seeing whether a game allows heroes and monsters to be epic by seeing whether it is impossible for many unimpressive little dudes it takes to kill an impressive big dude is foolhardily judging 5th by the standards of 3.5. It's as ridiculous as judging whether 3.5 allows good class variation by seeing whether each class in the game has a unique powers list like in 4e.

Of course the 3.5 standards don't apply, 5th is a different edition. What matters is whether or not those new standards make sense, and I think when your criticism of 5th's standard is something as frivolous as "The problem is, if huge armies answer most threats, why have adventurers?" then there's no reason to believe 5th edition's standard makes no sense.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 09:05 AM
Idk who Sextus is, but those other guys are all CR 30+, and that's in 3e terms. Odinson even has divine rank and J'onn might as well, if you let him use his telepathy and incorporeality to its full potential. If you want to model 5e power levels with superheroes, you're looking at Cap, Jessica Drew, Spidey or Black Canary (with Cry). Badarses every one, sure, but none would replace a well-trained militia.


Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor as 30+ in 3e? You're off your rocker. Each of them can easily be modeled with capabilities available to characters around levels 10-15. There is nothing that any of them do that makes them actually epic.

Seriously, Iron Man's power is super science (not really defined in any way in game), which grants him flight, above average durability, and energy blasts, all things you can get from a mid-high level Warlock. Not epic level.

Hulk gets angry and gets way stronger, some mix of Barb, Berserker, and Warhulk with a splash of super jump and the ability to technobabble like Tony when he's not raging. Probably a higher level character than Iron Man just because of raw power, but still nothing that exceeds 20th level.

Thor is pretty much a Warblade/Bloodstorm Blade with an artifact hammer and DvR0. You can't really make an argument for DvR1 because he doesn't have any of the godlike omniscience that comes with actual divine ranks, but I will give DvR0... luckily that's about on par with the +2LA Saint Template. Meanwhile he's got his Hammer that can control lightning and let him fly, but that has nothing to do with personal power. Another example of a mid-high character (in the same general power tier as Hulk), but not someone who is epic levels.




Now if you were going to model them in 5e... you really just couldn't. There aren't enough options out there, and it would all boil down to 100% fiat. Like I couldn't even guess what their expected levels would be in 5e, because the result is DNE.


Brova: You're using numbers in the hundreds to talk about amassing the common folk. Which is a little odd, given the medieval-esque setting of D&D. 13-14th century England had a population density of about 40 per square mile. A major city might have had 110,000 people in it, while your average village (even a decently sized one) would have been likely under 400 people. You'd gut the livelihood of a large swath of land every time you attempted such a thing.


40 people per square mile and cities with 100,000 people is actually a lot of population. It's not like Dragons are an every day occurrence, and even in the world today population density is only around 120 per square mile (average worldwide). I mean just for reference, England is 50,000 square miles, which using your numbers lends itself to an average population of around 2million. Now that population won't be evenly distributed, the 110,000 people in a city that's a single square mile is being counted into that average across the rest of the country. But the interesting thing is: The dragon has no real incentive to be attacking lone farmsteads unless he's starving and desperate.

If we're talking about a Dragon terrorizing a kingdom, he's going after a major population center. And once he hits a city with >100,000 people in it, he's going to get destroyed, because even with a militia consisting of just 5% of the population and no standing army, that's 5,000 people coming together to kill it. And 5,000 people with bows are totally going to win against the dragon, and casualties in the range of a couple hundred won't be noticed.

I honestly don't understand where you are getting the idea that a couple hundred deaths is catastrophic to a medieval population given the numbers you yourself provided. I'm not sure if you don't realize just how large an average country is in square miles, or if you're expecting the dragon to be avoiding a town of any size and instead spend his days raiding independent villages like some minor despot instead of a godlike being desiring the worship and fear of the populace.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2015-05-25, 09:14 AM
I honestly don't understand where you are getting the idea that a couple hundred deaths is catastrophic to a medieval population given the numbers you yourself provided. I'm not sure if you don't realize just how large an average country is in square miles, or if you're expecting the dragon to be avoiding a town of any size and instead spend his days raiding independent villages like some minor despot instead of a godlike being desiring the worship and fear of the populace.

I had assumed the Dragon would be intelligent enough to not attack a major city directly, actually. The intelligent thing to do WOULD be to hit the outlying farm areas, and, by doing so, starve out the city before launching an offensive. In the surrounding areas removing several hundred working-age citizens WOULD be seriously detrimental, as would forcing them to spend their time and resources arming themselves.

In effect, the Dragon is a one-man army. Actual armies of the time preferred to avoid direct confrontations with well-protected areas whenever possible: a siege was preferable to direct confrontation (fewer men and resources lost), and destroying outlying resource-providing countryside is a fantastic way to lay siege to a population center.

This is ESPECIALLY true because, in 5e, a suitably large group of people CAN pose a threat to a Dragon. The average Dragon is a highly intelligent and strategic creature in D&D -- it'll know this, and the above strategy is one of the best for completely throwing a country into disarray.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 09:19 AM
I had assumed the Dragon would be intelligent enough to not attack a major city directly, actually. The intelligent thing to do WOULD be to hit the outlying farm areas, and, by doing so, starve out the city before launching an offensive. In the surrounding areas removing several hundred working-age citizens WOULD be seriously detrimental, as would forcing them to spend their time and resources arming themselves.

In effect, the Dragon is a one-man army. Actual armies of the time preferred to avoid direct confrontations with well-protected areas whenever possible: a siege was preferable to direct confrontation (fewer men and resources lost), and destroying outlying resource-providing countryside is a fantastic way to lay siege to a population center.

This is ESPECIALLY true because, in 5e, a suitably large group of people CAN pose a threat to a Dragon. The average Dragon is a highly intelligent and strategic creature in D&D -- it'll know this, and the above strategy is one of the best for completely throwing a country into disarray.


So the complaint is the Dragon is afraid of large groups of little men.

The response is that no he's not, because population numbers are low enough that any attempt by little men to fight him will result in catastrophic losses.

And the reason the fight results in catastrophic losses is because the Dragon is not attacking a population center... because he is scared of large groups of little men.


Do you not see how that's a little circular and fails to address the point at all?

Djinn_in_Tonic
2015-05-25, 09:21 AM
So the complaint is the Dragon is afraid of large groups of little men.

The response is that no he's not, because population numbers are low enough that any attempt by little men to fight him will result in catastrophic losses.

And the reason the fight results in catastrophic losses is because the Dragon is not attacking a population center... because he is scared of large groups of little men.


Actually, I was never arguing that the Dragon being afraid of large groups of little men was a bad thing, or that he shouldn't be afraid of a large group of little men if actually confronted by one. He should be. I don't see an army-sized group of people taking out a Dragon as a bad thing.

I was pointing out that amassing such a large and coordinated group of little men would be very difficult outside of a large population center, and that most non-major population centers couldn't A: manage to efficiently assemble a force, and B: couldn't afford the loss that doing so would entail. Thus the Dragon is fairly free to rampage around the countryside and, by doing so, will eventually strike terror into the starved city populations. :smallbiggrin:

There's no circular reasoning there.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 09:29 AM
Actually, I was never arguing that the Dragon being afraid of large groups of little men was a bad thing

No, but the person you are arguing against is. If your solution to the given problem of "Dragons are afraid of little men" is "Dragons avoiding little men" you haven't actually presented an argument that will change anybody's mind. You have presented your reasoning for how things work in 5e as it stands, and that is fine. But if someone is not satisfied with the idea of an epic tier (seriously the dragon in question is CR24 or something) Dragon dying to a bunch of ordinary dudes with bows, telling them about how the Dragon can avoid little dudes with bows isn't going to make them feel any better about it, or change anybody's minds.

Djinn_in_Tonic
2015-05-25, 09:44 AM
No, but the person you are arguing against is. If your solution to the given problem of "Dragons are afraid of little men" is "Dragons avoiding little men" you haven't actually presented an argument that will change anybody's mind. You have presented your reasoning for how things work in 5e as it stands, and that is fine. But if someone is not satisfied with the idea of an epic tier (seriously the dragon in question is CR24 or something) Dragon dying to a bunch of ordinary dudes with bows, telling them about how the Dragon can avoid little dudes with bows isn't going to make them feel any better about it, or change anybody's minds.

Correct. As per my first point in this thread:


I fail to see a problem here. If you manage to mobilize and arm that much of a population (given that 5e seems to have more medieval-esque populations than 3.5e, to my knowledge) and then keep them organized, focused, and in formation against a single major enemy, I don't see the issue. That feat alone is almost as impressive as just fighting the Dragon yourself, and I'd totally be okay if my players decided to go that route.

The Dragon is an encounter. You can fight it yourself, or you can organize an army to do it for you. Both are practical solutions, if you can manage the logistics of managing to force the Dragon to confront your horde of commoners. Encounters in D&D don't have to be killed personally (or even killed at all) to be overcome.

My point is that it doesn't have to be an issue. If you don't like your Dragons vulnerable, than yes, 5e may a problem for you. But there are numerous ways to avoid ever having to confront the issue of a Dragon's mortality to three hundred commoners though, so the issue doesn't need to arise. They're mostly non-RAW rulings (based on human psychology, population structure, Dragon tactics, resource starvation -- all things the rulebooks don't cover), but covering non-specific story/rules issues is the DM's JOB.

You may agree or disagree as you wish.

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-25, 10:43 AM
Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor as 30+ in 3e? You're off your rocker. Each of them can easily be modeled with capabilities available to characters around levels 10-15. There is nothing that any of them do that makes them actually epic.

Hulk and Iron Man I can give you, maybe. Thor, on the other hand, goes from flying and controlling thunder to blowing up planets, travelling faster than light, travelling in time, resurrecting the dead, saving all the gods in all points of time and space through his willpower etc. crazy stuff in his weirder story lines. There might be some rules exploit allowing fur such feats pre-epic, but that's a technicality and relies on a really expansive reading of what's meant to be "available to characters around levels 10 - 15".



And did that at any point convince governments that an appropriate solution was "surrender sovereignty to armed maniacs"?

"Kill one, and you're a murderer. Kill ten, and you're a monster. Kill hundred, and you're a hero. Kill a thousand, and you're a conqueror."

Enough governments have gone down to revolutions and assassinations carried out by small groups of determined inviduals for me to say "yes" without bogging the thread down with long ruminations on history.


Except it's not. It's not in the source material (Smaug doesn't worry about the defenders of the Kingdom Under the Mountain), it's not in earlier editions of D&D. You can certainly construct a world where that statement is true, but that world is not D&D.

Uh huh. Apparently you have not read the monster manuals, because all the tactics I listed are from those. Also, if I were to model Smaug's attack on the Lonely Mountain in 5e, the first thing I'd point out is that circling around a mountain and/or tunneling through it allow a dragon to manipulate line of sight in such a way that it can fight a near-arbitrary number of low-level characters and win. Not worrying =/= not utilizing basic predatory tactics. The battle isn't described in enough detail for us to debate this, though. For all we know, Smaug would've gone down to mass projectile assault, but it was never attempted in the way you describe. It did go down to a single arrow in the end... a feat only replicable in most editions of D&D via a special magic artefact, which undermines your line of arguing as it shows how detached D&D actually is from its sources.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 10:47 AM
Hulk and Iron Man I can give you, maybe. Thor, on the other hand, goes from flying and controlling thunder to blowing up planets, travelling faster than light, travelling in time, resurrecting the dead, saving all the gods in all points of time and space through his willpower etc. crazy stuff in his weirder story lines. There might be some rules exploit allowing fur such feats pre-epic, but that's a technicality and relies on a really expansive reading of what's meant to be "available to characters around levels 10 - 15".


Sounds like the superman problem. I was considering Thor as typically presented, not necessarily Thor with every power he's ever demonstrated within the comics. Because while yes, he can do those things in the comics on occasion (I won't even bother checking you on it), blowing up planets and traveling through time aren't what people think of when they talk about Thor. They are thinking of the guy flying around smashing people in the face with his special hammer that only he can lift while tossing around lightning bolts. And that's totally a mid-level character concept.

Frozen_Feet
2015-05-25, 11:02 AM
Sounds like the superman problem. I was considering Thor as typically presented, not necessarily Thor with every power he's ever demonstrated within the comics. Because while yes, he can do those things in the comics on occasion (I won't even bother checking you on it), blowing up planets and traveling through time aren't what people think of when they talk about Thor.

...what people typically think of Thor is "HE'S A GOD OF THUNDER", which as a concept translates poorly from folk and contemporary myth to the idiosyncracies of 3e D&D.


They are thinking of the guy flying around smashing people in the face with his special hammer that only he can lift while tossing around lightning bolts. And that's totally a mid-level character concept.

Even when the flying happens between planets, the people are other gods, and the lightning bolts can destroy stars?

You're focusing too much on what Thor does, while ignoring the magnitude of how he does it. Even at his simplest, Thor is described lifting things in excess of ten tons - a feat not replicable in 3e without serious twinking of Str. Per rules as intended, that's Epic stuff. Again, there are exploits allowing it earlier, but that's a designing accident rather than intent.

Go look through the basic Epic feats in the SRD. For a by-the-book Fighter or Barbarian-type character, it takes well in excess of 20 character levels to achieve what characters like Hulk and Thor do, because even the Epic stuff for them just isn't that amazing. I point to Fighter and Barbarian, specifically, because "punching people in the face" is the core identity of those classes at all levels. The idea that such narrow concept is inherently mid-level is conceit of the metagame, not the actual rules of 3.x.

Darth Ultron
2015-05-25, 12:33 PM
Sounds like the superman problem. I was considering Thor as typically presented, not necessarily Thor with every power he's ever demonstrated within the comics. Because while yes, he can do those things in the comics on occasion (I won't even bother checking you on it), blowing up planets and traveling through time aren't what people think of when they talk about Thor. They are thinking of the guy flying around smashing people in the face with his special hammer that only he can lift while tossing around lightning bolts. And that's totally a mid-level character concept.

I guess it depends ''what people'' you ask. Ask Joe Smith the Plumber and sure he will say ''Thor is strong and can fly and shoot lightning''. Ask Edgar the Geek who has read most of the comics Thor has been in from the past 50 years or so....and you will get a much longer answer.

After all, Mjolnir can be ''just a magic hammer'', ''an artifact/relic'' or a ''unique item'' depending on how you want to make it.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 12:54 PM
You're focusing too much on what Thor does, while ignoring the magnitude of how he does it. Even at his simplest, Thor is described lifting things in excess of ten tons - a feat not replicable in 3e without serious twinking of Str. Per rules as intended, that's Epic stuff. Again, there are exploits allowing it earlier, but that's a designing accident rather than intent.


And yet doing it doesn't actually put you on the epic scale. 10 tons is seriously doable by a 33 strength colossal creature, and those are scattered throughout the level 10-20 range. Being able to do it as a medium humanoid is more impressive, but not actually more powerful. And of course as you note there are builds in 3e that totally allow going far beyond that well before level 20. Most people don't bother due to either obscurity or no real point, but it is totally possible.

Your argument seems to boil down to arguing RAI of the designers based on what stock Fighters and Barbarians are capable of. Whereas I feel it is more appropriate, especially in the case of named heroes, to look at what the system can allow and use that as a basis. Because honestly, I don't care if the designers intended for a 3e epic level Fighter to be a guy who gains +1 natural armor or can climb without penalties. Because while that may be the intention, the mechanics support a game where those are things real characters get at level 5, and epic level characters are far beyond that. If the poor Epic Fighter can't keep up, chances are he's not going to survive in an epic environment for long.


I guess it depends ''what people'' you ask. Ask Joe Smith the Plumber and sure he will say ''Thor is strong and can fly and shoot lightning''. Ask Edgar the Geek who has read most of the comics Thor has been in from the past 50 years or so....and you will get a much longer answer.

After all, Mjolnir can be ''just a magic hammer'', ''an artifact/relic'' or a ''unique item'' depending on how you want to make it.

I get that. But the first mental image you get when someone mentions thor tends not to be the guy traveling through time so he can shoot a bolt of lightning at a planet and blow it up. I'd guess there's a small hardcore number of people who are even aware that is a thing, and a much wider variety of people who are going to look to representations like the MCU for what Thor can do.

I will concede that time traveling planet destroying space faring Thor is in fact an epic character. I stand by my contention that the vast majority of people are not aware that Thor even exists.

Hawkstar
2015-05-25, 04:26 PM
And yet doing it doesn't actually put you on the epic scale. 10 tons is seriously doable by a 33 strength colossal creature, and those are scattered throughout the level 10-20 range. Being able to do it as a medium humanoid is more impressive, but not actually more powerful. And of course as you note there are builds in 3e that totally allow going far beyond that well before level 20. Most people don't bother due to either obscurity or no real point, but it is totally possible.

Your argument seems to boil down to arguing RAI of the designers based on what stock Fighters and Barbarians are capable of. Whereas I feel it is more appropriate, especially in the case of named heroes, to look at what the system can allow and use that as a basis. Because honestly, I don't care if the designers intended for a 3e epic level Fighter to be a guy who gains +1 natural armor or can climb without penalties. Because while that may be the intention, the mechanics support a game where those are things real characters get at level 5, and epic level characters are far beyond that. If the poor Epic Fighter can't keep up, chances are he's not going to survive in an epic environment for long.Using the RAI of what the core combat classes are capable of is far, far more appropriate for measuring intended character power and ability than trying to base it on whatever the hell munchkins can grotesquely twist the system into accomplishing.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 04:50 PM
Using the RAI of what the core combat classes are capable of is far, far more appropriate for measuring intended character power and ability than trying to base it on whatever the hell munchkins can grotesquely twist the system into accomplishing.

You obviously have some serious problems with the idea of player agency if you think that building characters capable of super heroic feats is "munchkins grotesquely twisting the system". I mean seriously if we're talking about a supergenius crafter who flies, shoots lazers, and occasionally punches people... that's literally a Warlock with a little reflavoring. The only time you have to ignore RAI to create supers is when you're looking at the capability of mundane characters, because the developers had a blind spot a mile wide regarding them, so you have to get creative to make it work.

Talakeal
2015-05-25, 05:23 PM
So, I may be a little late to the party, but I would like to way in on the 4E= WoW discussion.

I personally played and enjoyed World of Warcraft for 10 years. Before that I played other MMOs and the Warcraft RTS games for another ten years. I would hardly say that I am someone who disliked WoW.

When I look at WoW vs. 4E I find three major sources of comparison:

1: Lack of Strategic Play

World of Warcraft allows characters to more or less come into every fight at full strength. Your performance in previous encounters rarely if ever influences your chances with the current encounter. In World of Warcraft I would say this is a very good thing. It allows every encounter to stand on its own and be exciting (at least in theory. A lot of trash pulls in dungeons now serves no purpose except to pad out the length of content).
I remember in Everquest trying to solo and having to sit for upwards of half an hour to heal to full between fights. Even in groups mana regen buffs were the most valuable thing in the game and players would have bards who did nothing but sit in the corner playing songs to speed up resource regeneration. This was terrible.
I remember a lot of people praising Halo with its regenerating shield system as a break through in FPS design as it allowed you to treat every encounter as a standalone showpiece challenge. Now it seems like every FPS has a similar mechanic whether or not it has any in universe justification like the Halo shield.

4E does something very similar. Few status conditions last longer than a few rounds, let alone an encounter. Healing surges allow people to recover from almost any injury in a matter of hours. The AEDU system allows you to, aside from daily powers, be completely refreshed between every fight.

In theory this should work out cool, as it eliminates the 15 minute adventuring day and frustrating situations where you have a run of bad luck / decisions and have to abandon the quest. But, on the other hand, it makes combats dull. Most fights have virtually no chance of actually killing the PCs (which is good, as you can't just respawn at the graveyard and try again), and therefore they don't do anything but slow the party down (see trash pulls in WoW above). Furthermore they reward static play where the only incentive is maximizing efficiency, and since the same powers are available every fight there isn't as much reason to deviate.

Now, don't get me wrong. A well done 4E combat is fun and plays like an exciting tactical board game. But if the combat isn't exceptionally well done it really has no bearing on the whole of the adventure and just slows everything to a crawl.

Note that pre 3E the game was very tactical and all about conserving and tracking limited resources. 3E kind of got rid of this with the whole 15 minute adventuring day thing, and 4E tried to just roll the 15MWD into the base assumption of the game rather than going back to earlier edition's style of play. This is a very WoW like decision.

2: Class Roles:
WoW didn't invent class roles, and in fact was a lot more lenient about them than most earlier MMOs. Note though, that WoW changed the landscape, and in my experience while class roles in MMOs were fairly common before WoW they were not ubiquitous like they seem to be now. IMO these were the worst parts of WoW. I don't know how frustrating it was to constantly be told that my class was only good for one thing or have the designers throw a "hybrid tax" and anyone who tried to play outside of their class's assigned role. Early WoW was very much bring the class not the player, and even within given roles there were many things that required a specific class. Not fun.

Now, earlier D&D kind of had roles, but they weren't clearly defined. Anyone could, theoretically, tank, do damage, or focus on ooc skills. Healing was pretty protected, and a lot of skill stuff was rogue / bard only, but it wasn't too hard to play against type. 0-3E warriors could easily out DPS rogues, rogues could, with the right build, easily out tank warriors, and casters could pretty much do anything you wanted them to.

4E comes along and gives everyone clearly defined roles, both in intent and practice. It is the first edition to actually spell out roles in the book. While there are a few cases where you can be OK at a secondary role (just like early WoW), but never as good as a "pure" class. Furthermore the game really doesn't reward unusual builds. Playing against type has gotten harder and harder in each edition of D&D. The 3E skill and saving throw system was really bad in this regard, but 4E made it worse.

The game also assumes that everyone is a combatant, which is a very Warcraft way to look at it. In earlier editions I could play a scholar or a healer or a diplomat or a scout and not have to get my hands dirty. 4E does virtually nothing to differentiate characters out of combat and one has to try very hard to play a pacifist character and still contribute in combat.

3: Lack of Realism

Ok, call it what you want. Lack of realism, lack of logic, lack of verisimilitude, lack of simulationism, disassociated mechanics, overly gamist / narrativist design choices, overuse of abstraction, what have you, the sentiment is the same.

Earlier editions of D&D like to keep up the appearance of a consistent world. Most every power in the game has an explanation, and they try and keep consistent with known real world laws (or consistent fantasy world laws). Things have explanations and generally follow common sense.

Most video games do not have anywhere near the fidelity towards logical cause and effect that D&D does. The game doesn't question why characters can't break down a locked door, or climb over a short obstruction, or how they can fit 2,000 round of ammunition in their pocket, or why simply touching the water kills them. These are accepted as limits of the programming or taken for convenience sake. D&D, with its living DM, generally has a much tighter reign on this sort of thing.

Warcraft is particularly bad about this. The game doesn't try and explain why people can heal from any injury in moments, why you can carry a dozen horses, five dragons, three suits of armor, and half a million gold coins around in your bags without being encumbered, why you can teleport in and out of dungeons, why your enemies respawn every week, why killing monsters gives you "points" that you can trade to NPCs for gear, why a wolf in Pandaria is higher level than The Lich King, why items become bound to you once you use them, why you can craft a motorcycle in 10 seconds, how you can have two different character builds that you can switch between but never mix, etc. etc. etc.

The developers of WoW are on record as saying that their policy is that if the gameplay conflicts with the lore the gameplay will always win out.

4E does not go to nearly the same levels as WoW does, but it is a lot closer than any other edition of D&D. Marks, minions, AEDU powers, healing surges, level requirements on items, spending on action to command a minion, enemies taking damage from powers with no apparent cause, tripping slimes and snakes, poisoning skeletons or making them bleed, the list goes on and on. These require a lot of mental gymnastics to justify, and more often than not the books don't even try.


So yeah, 4E and WoW are not the same game. But they have made a lot of the same design decisions and are a lot closer than any previous edition of D&D, and these design decisions do not always transfer properly across media.

Hawkstar
2015-05-25, 05:27 PM
-snip-You are giving Healing Surges way too unfair of a rap. They're not infinite free-health between fights - they're your hit points. Except a 4e character only ever has access to a small fraction of their daily hitpoints in any given fight.

Talakeal
2015-05-25, 05:44 PM
You are giving Healing Surges way too unfair of a rap. They're not infinite free-health between fights - they're your hit points. Except a 4e character only ever has access to a small fraction of their daily hitpoints in any given fight.

HP in D&D has always been abstract and weird.

It just seems very strange to me that I can be beaten to an inch of my life to the point where even a single point of damage could kill me, and then the next day be up at full strength without any magic involved.

Heck, I don't even know if it is possible to give someone a mundane injury in 4E that will last more than 24 hours.

Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does remove an element of strategy from the game, the same one that WoW removed when they allowed characters to heal to full in ~20 seconds so long as they are out of combat and have some food at hand.

Seerow
2015-05-25, 06:34 PM
You are giving Healing Surges way too unfair of a rap. They're not infinite free-health between fights - they're your hit points. Except a 4e character only ever has access to a small fraction of their daily hitpoints in any given fight.

Agree with you here that healing surges get an unfair reputation due to the developers being too generous in 4e. I think the biggest problem with 4e was that the number of surges was balanced assuming a very high encounter rate; and they (plus your HP) recovered 100% overnight. This led to a feeling of immortality for characters who could take damage equivalent to 4x their max hp in a single day, not counting any external healing, and then wake up and do it again the next day no problem. So while I really like the concept of healing surges, I will admit 4e's implementation has issues.

In my 3e games, I backported healing surges but with a few modifications. Base healing surges got rolled back to 3+con, with a couple classes and feats that give 1-2 extra. Healing Surges aren't required for using healing spells, but can be used any time you receive healing to double the effect of that healing. Healing surges recover at a rate of just 1 per day. It gives players significantly more durability over the course of a day, but makes wearing down the PCs possible, and PCs generally need a few days to a week off after a long adventuring day to recuperate.

JAL_1138
2015-05-25, 07:04 PM
HP in D&D has always been abstract and weird.

It just seems very strange to me that I can be beaten to an inch of my life to the point where even a single point of damage could heal me, and then the next day be up at full strength without any magic involved.

Heck, I don't even know if it is possible to give someone a mundane injury in 4E that will last more than 24 hours.

Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does remove an element of strategy from the game, the same one that WoW removed when they allowed characters to heal to full in ~20 seconds so long as they are out of combat and have some food at hand.

For 5e I use Healing Kit Dependency, Slow Natural Healing, and Lingering Injuries to get around the nonsensically-fast easy healing of the default rules.

AD&D, back in the day, wasn't a "heroic fantasy" game, especially at low to mid level, despite what some people claim. It was probably more accurately described as survival horror. :smalltongue:

zinycor
2015-05-25, 07:08 PM
I expect 6th edition to get rid of alignments :D

5th already doesn't have many spells (if any) which are dependant of it and on the PHB it gr less than a page to describe it.

Brova
2015-05-25, 07:36 PM
I expect 6th edition to get rid of alignments :D

This. The whole good/evil, law/chaos system doesn't work. Both because good and evil are never defined and because law and chaos don't actually end up being opposite forces. It also fails to discuss the actual moral issues people face in D&D. Namely, how can you consider yourself good when you spend your life breaking into people's homes, brutally murdering them, and stealing their property. While you certainly could write out a bunch of ethical systems, the thing you actually have to do is explain that.

To get adventuring to work morally, you basically need to do away with the idea that you're killing people and taking their stuff. So the default for "down" in combat should be unconscious rather than dead, and PCs need an incentive to keep enemies alive. But you do also want some things you can just kill. I think you can basically divide creatures into four categories: people, animals, demons, and vampires.

People are all the various sapient races like Myconids or Drow. While you may disagree with the Myconid's radical Marxism or the Drow's chattel slavery, basically no one is okay with you slaughtering them, let alone killing noncombatants or committing genocide.

Animals are things like wolves, manticores, or the torrasque. People may oppose you actively torturing wolves to death, but killing them is never particularly amoral. It may actually be moral to kill animals if they're actively threatening people.

Demons are, well, demons. Demons in this model exist to do things that are morally wrong. They are, in some sense, not actually moral agents because they will always choose to do whatever is maximally bad. Killing demons is always moral, regardless of what the happen to be doing. Because, you know, pure evil.

Vampires represent both literally vampires and all the other critters that kill people to survive (i.e. mind flayers). These guys represent a moral grey area. While any individual mind flayer may spend time doing things that are objectively and measurably good, it is nevertheless true that they must kill people and eat their brains to survive.

That's less than a paragraph and already more practically useful than 90% of what WoTC has published with respect to alignment. The next step is to layer on a discussion about the morality of killing truly repugnant people (Can you kill Hitler? Before the holocaust? After the holocaust? As a baby?). Then add some game mechanically meaningless alignments based off a various actual philosophies. Then, instead of claiming your actions are "good" you can talk about how they are justified by doing the greatest good for the greatest number, or acting according to universal law, or whatever.

Lord Raziere
2015-05-25, 08:08 PM
......nah, I can't get behind that Brova.

while I'm all for getting rid of the alignment system and all sapient peoples being equally playable, neither am I against killing any sapient person thats evil. sure I want to play a good orc, but I'm not going to shed any tears over killing evil ones as long as there is an innocent village of orcs somewhere or something that aren't getting slaughtered because ambiguous morality. and I don't really consider it evil to hold such a position, when your a hero in a fantasy world, you just have to kill things to make any progress. not every good hero is a bleeding heart or loving of everyone in their compassion, leave such moralizing to the saints. knocking people out a lot just feels too much like a kids cartoon.

while vampires and demons generally are evil, for them I'd just make good variants on them that look a lot like them but work in a slightly different way that isn't evil.

Hawkstar
2015-05-25, 08:31 PM
People are all the various sapient races like Myconids or Drow. While you may disagree with the Myconid's radical Marxism or the Drow's chattel slavery, basically no one is okay with you slaughtering them, let alone killing noncombatants or committing genocide.
Actually, Drow, Goblinoids, and Orcs under this model are "Demons". The only reason they're not in D&D is:
1. They're from the material plane.
and
2. They don't need all the goodies that come from the Outsider or Fiend types.

Brova
2015-05-25, 08:36 PM
while I'm all for getting rid of the alignment system and all sapient peoples being equally playable, neither am I against killing any sapient person thats evil. sure I want to play a good orc, but I'm not going to shed any tears over killing evil ones as long as there is an innocent village of orcs somewhere or something that aren't getting slaughtered because ambiguous morality. and I don't really consider it evil to hold such a position, when your a hero in a fantasy world, you just have to kill things to make any progress. not every good hero is a bleeding heart or loving of everyone in their compassion, leave such moralizing to the saints. knocking people out a lot just feels too much like a kids cartoon.

The morality of "killing evil people" depends on a variety of things, mostly what counts as "evil" to a degree that killing is appropriate. It's basically reasonable for there to be some groups of orcs you can killing (demon worshipers perhaps), but the general rule should probably be against killing sapients capable of making moral choices.


while vampires and demons generally are evil, for them I'd just make good variants on them that look a lot like them but work in a slightly different way that isn't evil.

It is useful for the setting to have some things in it that are unambiguously evil. Both because it allows you to tell new stories, and because it lets you have adventures that ignore the moral complexities of killing thinking beings. Vampires are a complex case. Any particular vampire might be good, but even if he is he still has to drain people's blood to live, which is fairly evil.


Actually, Drow, Goblinoids, and Orcs under this model are "Demons". The only reason they're not in D&D is:
1. They're from the material plane.
and
2. They don't need all the goodies that come from the Outsider or Fiend types.

No.

There are two reasons why not. First, people want to play all of those things. If drow are fundamentally evil, playing one is not an acceptable choice. Therefore, from a game design perspective drow have to be at least capable of being good. Frankly, we should probably cut the Drizzt "rebel" BS, declare drow to just be elves with a spider fetish, and move on. Maybe add a setting piece about drow being divided between evil followers of Lolth and the good followers of some other spider goddess. Second, drow are capable of choosing to be good. The requirement to be a demon under this model isn't that you are personally evil. It's that you are incapable of not being evil. It may well be true that drow society is morally repulsive. Frankly, it probably is given the whole "chattel slavery" deal they have going on. Maybe it even needs to be tuned down if they are to be a PC race. But drow can be good, which makes them people.

Milo v3
2015-05-25, 08:39 PM
Any particular vampire might be good, but even if he is he still has to drain people's blood to live, which is fairly evil.

Even that, I would say isn't evil.

zinycor
2015-05-25, 08:45 PM
My main problem on alignment is whole nature of being objective

I guess if all you do in your game is going in and out of dungeos is fine for when you find that sword which only works with "good" people. But for more complex games which require to make hard decisions having the DM tell you: "And now you are evil, cause the rules says so!!!" it's damn stupid.

Good and evil, is not a thing to be glassed over, nor is freedom Vs the common good, those are deep things and we should treat them as such.

Other roleplaying games don't have alignments, but a necromancer who goes around killing thousands only to become the supreme lord of the world is evil, even if you don't have complex rules to define him as such.

Brova
2015-05-25, 08:46 PM
Even that, I would say isn't evil.

It depends on a variety of factors. The big one being whether feeding is lethal or not. If you have to kill people to live, you are evil or at least close as makes no odds. After all, we killed wolves because they were dangerous and they were perfectly capable of surviving without killing humans. On the other hand, if all you have to do is drain some blood, being a vampire is largely okay. The other question is whether you can feed from animals. If you can, it negates a lot of the degree to which even lethal feeding is problematic. Again, we totally kill pigs for food - the vampire is just a little less efficient about it.

Milo v3
2015-05-25, 08:56 PM
It depends on a variety of factors. The big one being whether feeding is lethal or not. If you have to kill people to live, you are evil or at least close as makes no odds. After all, we killed wolves because they were dangerous and they were perfectly capable of surviving without killing humans. On the other hand, if all you have to do is drain some blood, being a vampire is largely okay. The other question is whether you can feed from animals. If you can, it negates a lot of the degree to which even lethal feeding is problematic. Again, we totally kill pigs for food - the vampire is just a little less efficient about it.

Even if it was lethal, I would say it doesn't necessarily make it evil. Otherwise nearly all omnivores are evil. As you say, we kill pigs for food.

Brova
2015-05-25, 09:09 PM
Even if it was lethal, I would say it doesn't necessarily make it evil. Otherwise nearly all omnivores are evil. As you say, we kill pigs for food.

Well, pigs aren't people. The fact that you have to do it to survive does not (at least in my mind) excuse killing people.

Milo v3
2015-05-25, 09:21 PM
Well, pigs aren't people. The fact that you have to do it to survive does not (at least in my mind) excuse killing people.

*Shrug* A vampire could easily say humans aren't people. Anyway, in my mind survival is neutral, not evil.

Lord Raziere
2015-05-25, 09:51 PM
No.

There are two reasons why not. First, people want to play all of those things. If drow are fundamentally evil, playing one is not an acceptable choice. Therefore, from a game design perspective drow have to be at least capable of being good. Frankly, we should probably cut the Drizzt "rebel" BS, declare drow to just be elves with a spider fetish, and move on. Maybe add a setting piece about drow being divided between evil followers of Lolth and the good followers of some other spider goddess. Second, drow are capable of choosing to be good. The requirement to be a demon under this model isn't that you are personally evil. It's that you are incapable of not being evil. It may well be true that drow society is morally repulsive. Frankly, it probably is given the whole "chattel slavery" deal they have going on. Maybe it even needs to be tuned down if they are to be a PC race. But drow can be good, which makes them people.

I agree that I want to play a Drow. I just don't agree with you that we should make a special exception on killing them just because they look a lot like myself. I mean, even if you say they are completely human evil guys, doesn't stop me from killing them and I'm human. and at some point in my adventuring career I'll probably have to kill some shapeshifter or whatever, so I can't really let appearances dictate my judgement, and some people even want to play demons. I mean, there is a reason why Tieflings are a core race in 5e and 4e y'know? wanting to play demons is what got us Drizzt in the first place.

personally, I'd just discard all morality and have adventurers of all kinds of races and beings all going around killing each other as they search for treasure and adventure- perhaps the people you encounter in dungeons are just other adventurers trying to compete with you for the loot and kills?

zinycor
2015-05-25, 10:12 PM
*Shrug* A vampire could easily say humans aren't people. Anyway, in my mind survival is neutral, not evil.

And they saying that humans aren't people and then killing humans, is exactly the reason the adventurers would go and kill the vampire. Because the vampire would represent a danger to them and their loved ones.

At least if the players are not vampires, if they were they would have the vampire's interest in mind.

And if th characters were Druids they might go hunting for the people who kill poor innocent pigs who have done nothing to deserve it.

This would be much more interesting than just saying.

Vampire is evil, am good, i kill vampire...

Vampire is evil, am evil, I help vampire

NomGarret
2015-05-25, 10:26 PM
I think the point of grouping sapient species together was that, yeah, on an individual basis you may very well have cause to kill one, some, or many of them, but let setting-specific cultural norms determine the consequences, not an alignment system. I don't think anyone was saying "no one can kill playable races, because it's a sacred type of life" more that it be treated on an individual basis.

Killing the Drow cultist = fine. Murdering her infant son = not fine.

Killing rabid wolf = fine. Torturing puppies/killing all wolves everywhere = not fine.

Killing demon = fine. Killing half-formed demon larva = fine.

Brova
2015-05-25, 10:29 PM
I think the point of grouping sapient species together was that, yeah, on an individual basis you may very well have cause to kill one, some, or many of them, but let setting-specific cultural norms determine the consequences, not an alignment system. I don't think anyone was saying "no one can kill playable races, because it's a sacred type of life" more that it be treated on an individual basis.

Killing the Drow cultist = fine. Murdering her infant son = not fine.

Killing rabid wolf = fine. Torturing puppies/killing all wolves everywhere = not fine.

Killing demon = fine. Killing half-formed demon larva = fine.

Basically this. Killing drow is wrong in the same way that killing people is wrong. You may have to do it, and there are some conditions where it's acceptable, but it is generally wrong to go around murdering drow.

Lord Raziere
2015-05-25, 10:43 PM
I think the point of grouping sapient species together was that, yeah, on an individual basis you may very well have cause to kill one, some, or many of them, but let setting-specific cultural norms determine the consequences, not an alignment system. I don't think anyone was saying "no one can kill playable races, because it's a sacred type of life" more that it be treated on an individual basis.

Killing the Drow cultist = fine. Murdering her infant son = not fine.

Killing rabid wolf = fine. Torturing puppies/killing all wolves everywhere = not fine.

Killing demon = fine. Killing half-formed demon larva = fine.

ok, sure I agree with that. but then you potentially get the Tiefling problem of having strong demonic heritage and such, where do they fall in this equation? and what happens when somebody really does want to play a demon, real one not a Tiefling, for some reason? cause I bet you, it'll happen someday. it probably already has. do you simply make a separate setting where thats viable, or...?

Brova
2015-05-25, 10:54 PM
ok, sure I agree with that. but then you potentially get the Tiefling problem of having strong demonic heritage and such, where do they fall in this equation? and what happens when somebody really does want to play a demon, real one not a Tiefling, for some reason? cause I bet you, it'll happen someday. it probably already has. do you simply make a separate setting where thats viable, or...?

Honestly I don't really care. We're talking about the two page discussion on morality you have in the PHB/DMG. People want to play demons enough that you will probably eventually release a splatbook with the Warlock class, the Tiefling race, and an explanation about how some demons are special snowflakes and can be good. D&D is a kitchen sink setting. There are good demons somewhere. You know, probably.

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-05-25, 11:58 PM
My main problem on alignment is whole nature of being objective

I guess if all you do in your game is going in and out of dungeos is fine for when you find that sword which only works with "good" people. But for more complex games which require to make hard decisions having the DM tell you: "And now you are evil, cause the rules says so!!!" it's damn stupid.

Good and evil, is not a thing to be glassed over, nor is freedom Vs the common good, those are deep things and we should treat them as such.

Other roleplaying games don't have alignments, but a necromancer who goes around killing thousands only to become the supreme lord of the world is evil, even if you don't have complex rules to define him as such.

Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are objective in D&D and not in other games in the same way and for the same reason that some games have objectively-existent gods/spirits/demons/etc. while others don't: because the kinds of stories the designers want to tell need it to be that way. In D&D's case, capital-G Good and capital-E Evil aren't around so that you can have Good-only swords and an Evil alignment to threaten PCs with if they kill innocent commoners, they're around in the flavor so that (A) mortals can align themselves with something greater than themselves without needing to follow a specific god (partly because Gygax and Arneson didn't include specific gods in the original game so that groups could make their own, thus necessitating campaign-agnostic divine forces) and (B) high-fantasy clashes like those in Tolkien's and Moorcock's works are well-supported, and they're around in the mechanics so that (A) beings could be quickly and easily be separated into a few different factions (D&D started off with a wargame, after all, and there were originally just three factions for "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys" vs. "Don't Care Just Please Don't Kill Me") and (B) you can have mechanical support for warding off demons, detecting the taint of evil on something, and so forth.

Alignment does not prevent "complex" games at all, and I'm not sure why you think good/evil/law/chaos/neutrality would be glossed over by virtue of there being mechanical implications for them; if anything, their omnipresence would tend to have people treat them fairly seriously in the course of figuring them out. If alignments do get in the way of playing more morally gray games (and most of the time I hear "alignment get in the way of playing deep, realistic, gritty games!" from the same crowd that say "dirty rotten rules get in the way of Real Roleplaying!"), you can simply ignore them...but it's a lot easier to say "For this game, we're ignoring everything alignment-related" than to come up with the framework and support to insert them into the game, so it's better for D&D to have them by default and let people use them or not as they desire than to continue stripping them out of successive editions and leave those who do like and use alignments high and dry.

goto124
2015-05-26, 12:11 AM
(D&D started off with a wargame, after all, and there were originally just three factions for "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys" vs. "Don't Care Just Please Don't Kill Me")

I wonder if this makes a good (har har) alignment system, if we're going the way of simplistic don't-think-too-hard-about-it morality.

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-05-26, 12:39 AM
D&D went from one-axis to two-axis alignment way back in the OD&D days, exactly because one-axis alignment is really too simplistic once you branch out beyond the boundaries of Basic D&D. The original axis was Law vs. Chaos, calling back to Moorcock and basically mapping to Law = Civilization = Heroes, Chaos = Wilderness = Monsters, and Neutrality = Border Towns = Innocent Bystanders and Random Civilians, which works great for the "Step 1: head out to border towns for plot hooks, Step 2: head into the wilderness for adventures and dungeons, Step 3: kill a bunch of monsters and loot them, Step 4: repeat steps 2-3 until rich and powerful, Step 5: build keep and raise army to turn dangerous border towns into bastions of civilization, Step 6: either retire or return to Step 1" game flowchart but not so much for anything more complex.

The second axis was introduced to dissociate goodness from Law and evilness from Chaos (because they really aren't the same and conflating them removes a lot of interesting possibilities) and to allow for intra-faction disagreement and inter-faction cooperation: instead of having the good angels and the evil demons and never the twain shall cooperate, now you have the LE devils and CE demons fighting each other for dominance, while the LG archons and CG eladrin subtly prop up their own side of the fiendish conflict while overtly staying out of things and being on good terms with each other to (A) ensure that their rivals' philosophy doesn't win and (B) keep the war going because if the demons and devils united the Upper Planes would be screwed. Nine alignments also gives you six additional personality/value archetypes for beginning players to work with and learn from, and for DMs to use as shorthand for their NPCs.

If you're going to do a one-axis alignment system (as an optional variant; leave my two-axis system alone and get off my lawn! :smallwink:), Law vs. Chaos is definitely the better option than Good vs. Evil, since both ends of their axis have their good and bad aspects (thus justifying the Neutral position) and PCs can have reasoned disagreements over which is better whereas "No guys, evil is totally cooler!" PCs tend to be bad for group cohesion, but I personally find that if you're going to do a one-axis system it's better and easier to just not use it for your games.

SouthpawSoldier
2015-05-26, 12:44 AM
But seriously, I think that backgrounds were a step in the right direction and I feel like 'commoner' levels would be a logical next step. Something that always bothered me about D&D (not just 5e) was that your adventurers were dropped into the world at level 1 when clearly they would have needed to have a life before they started killing monsters. Having a few levels of 'carpenter' or 'tailor' might be a more enticing exploration of the background mechanic, and giving the species/races levels instead of static bonuses would let players individually decide how much their physical identity defines their character. Hey, maybe between chronicles characters would accrue these skill/junk levels when they return to their mundane lives.

I've actually brought this up as an idea for a campaign; the first adventure/module, the party is made up of commoner classes. Choices made during the adventure determine classes as the culmination of that quest. Following adventures are built around coming to terms with becoming a hero, learning new powers, etc. Shot down pretty emphatically by the Playground.


RE: the more recent posts in this thread:
Many are confusing sentience with sapience. Sentience is only being able to perceive the world; sapience is that quality of individual identity and thought. Animals are sentient, but only thinking creatures are sapient. The argument then becomes a matter of defining and measuring sapience. Only relatively recently have we been able to perceive the sapience of some species. Whether responses in tests demonstrate true sapience or just a trained reaction to stimuli is another debate.

How this applies to the good/evil paradigm can be resolved via a philosophy of non-aggression. A common philosophical stance is that aggression, the initiation of force against another sapient being, is never just; the use of force is only moral when used to neutralize a threat, active or implied. Hunting and eating sentient, non-sapient creatures doesn't qualify, as a lack of sapience means a lack of consciousness, a lack of self*.

As this applies to D&D; any individual, culture, or species that behaves in an aggressive manner against another sapient species can be considered evil. Drow actively enslave other species, and follow a policy of extermination for surface dwelling elves. Goblinoids actively seek to destroy for the sake of destruction*. Thay exists to subjugate and remove agency of other cultures. All inarguably evil.

*Sentient, non sapient animals and Goblinoids points;

Just because a creature lacks a sense of self doesn't grant carte blanche to cause harm for entertainment. Goblin cruelty against non-sapient and sapient alike is evil either way, as the purpose of the harm is not subsistence. Eating a non-sapient for survival; it is a matter of need. "Needless cruelty" is a icon of evil for a reason; the lack of justifiable purpose condemns the action.

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-05-26, 01:16 AM
But seriously, I think that backgrounds were a step in the right direction and I feel like 'commoner' levels would be a logical next step. Something that always bothered me about D&D (not just 5e) was that your adventurers were dropped into the world at level 1 when clearly they would have needed to have a life before they started killing monsters. Having a few levels of 'carpenter' or 'tailor' might be a more enticing exploration of the background mechanic, and giving the species/races levels instead of static bonuses would let players individually decide how much their physical identity defines their character. Hey, maybe between chronicles characters would accrue these skill/junk levels when they return to their mundane lives.

Backgrounds are nothing new, they've been in the game since at least AD&D. 1e had the option to start you off with backgrounds in the form of Secondary Skills:


When a player character selects a class, this profession is assumed to be that which the character has been following previously, virtually to the exclusion of all other activities. Thus the particular individual is at 1st level of ability. However, some minor knowledge of certain mundane skills might belong to the player character - information and training from early years or incidentally picked up while the individual was in apprenticeship learning his or her primary professional skills of clericism, fighting, etc. If your particular campaign is aimed at a level of play where secondary skills can be taken into account, then use the table below to assign them to player characters, or even to henchmen if you so desire.

Assign a skill randomly, or select according to the background of your campaign. To determine if a second skill is known, roll on the table, and if the dice indicate a result of TWO SKILLS, then assign a second, appropriate one.

SECONDARY SKILLS TABLE
Dice ScoreResult
01-02Armorer
03-04Bowyer/fletcher
05-10Farmer/gardener
11-14Fisher (netting)
15-20Forester
21-23Gambler
24-27Hunter/fisher (hook and line)
28-32Husbandman (animal husbandry)
33-34Jeweler/lapidary
35-37Leather worker/tanner
38-39Limner/painter
40-42Mason/carpenter
43-44Miner
45-46Navigator (fresh or salt water)
47-49Sailor (fresh or salt)
50-51Shipwright (boats or ships)
52-54Tailor/weaver
55-57Teamster/freighter
58-60Trader/barterer
61-64Trapper/furrier
65-67Woodworker/cabinetmaker
68-85NO SKILL OF MEASURABLE WORTH
86-00ROLL TWICE IGNORING THIS RESULT HEREAFTER
When secondary skills are used, it is up to the DM to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character. As a general rule, having a skill will give the character the ability to determine the general worth and soundness of an item, the ability to find food, make small repairs, or actually construct (crude) items. For example, an individual with armorer skill could tell the quality of normal armor, repair chain links, or perhaps fashion certain weapons. To determine the extent of knowledge in question, simply assume the role of one of these skills, one that you know a little something about, and determine what could be done with this knowledge. Use this as a scale to weigh the relative ability of characters with secondary skills.

(See also THE CAMPAIGN, SOCIAL CLASS & RANK IN AD&D.)

Secondary skills were folded into non-adventuring-relevant Nonweapon Proficiencies in 2e, and then into the Craft/Knowledge/Perform/Profession quartet of skills in 3e. As far as "commoner levels" go, non-important NPCs in AD&D were "0th-level humanoids" and, if desired, PCs could be started off at that point, and 3.0 had rules for 0th-level characters and 1st-level multiclassing in the DMG.

It's funny...after many people lauded 4e for ditching the "useless" non-adventuring-relevant background stuff (the codifying of which, by the way, a lot of people said was purely a 3e invention) and scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever need rules for roleplaying (perish the thought!), 5e is lauded for the "new" and "ingenious" idea of backgrounds that have been in the game since the start and were so loudly decried a mere handful of years before. Everything old is new again, huh? :smallwink:

erikun
2015-05-26, 07:12 AM
Most of the WotC D&D versions actually do a reasonably good job of introducing and implementing new mechanics. As much as I may dislike how D&D3e skills and feats worked, or the mechanic behind D&D4e healing surges, they certainly are not something which I could've come up with easily myself.

As for what thye change, it depends on what people ultimately find wrong with D&D5e and what they want from a RPG at the time. It's really difficult for me to say what could work, because I'm not even familiar with D&D5e. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing left for a new edition to do.

zinycor
2015-05-26, 07:54 AM
Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are objective in D&D and not in other games in the same way and for the same reason that some games have objectively-existent gods/spirits/demons/etc. while others don't: because the kinds of stories the designers want to tell need it to be that way.

Exactly, so when we get rid of alignment it won't be needed anymore, so everything is fine.


In D&D's case, capital-G Good and capital-E Evil aren't around so that you can have Good-only swords and an Evil alignment to threaten PCs with if they kill innocent commoners, they're around in the flavor so that (A) mortals can align themselves with something greater than themselves without needing to follow a specific god (partly because Gygax and Arneson didn't include specific gods in the original game so that groups could make their own, thus necessitating campaign-agnostic divine forces)

Never seen a character played by a player whose motivation to being a hero is: So i can relate to something greater than myself, BUT not a god, just good, the whole cosmic force of good.

I guess is posible, but i don't really see the value on it.


and (B) high-fantasy clashes like those in Tolkien's and Moorcock's works are well-supported, and they're around in the mechanics so that (A) beings could be quickly and easily be separated into a few different factions (D&D started off with a wargame, after all, and there were originally just three factions for "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys" vs. "Don't Care Just Please Don't Kill Me") and (B) you can have mechanical support for warding off demons, detecting the taint of evil on something, and so forth.

at this point, when we are discussig on a sixth edition of the game, don't really see why should we care about DnD starting as a wargame...

I like support to fightng or detecting devils, or angels. But the fact that a paladin can just walk to a person, detect evil on this person and say "EVIL!!!" is stupid. on the taint of evil on an item, just detect magic on it,


Alignment does not prevent "complex" games at all, and I'm not sure why you think good/evil/law/chaos/neutrality would be glossed over by virtue of there being mechanical implications for them; if anything, their omnipresence would tend to have people treat them fairly seriously in the course of figuring them out.

do you treat Armor Class fairly seriously? As a game mechanic, of course, and so is alignment, nothing more than a game mechanic. the problem is that things like good and evil, are way deeper than that, and I don't see the use on making them overly simple.


If alignments do get in the way of playing more morally gray games (and most of the time I hear "alignment get in the way of playing deep, realistic, gritty games!" from the same crowd that say "dirty rotten rules get in the way of Real Roleplaying!"), you can simply ignore them...but it's a lot easier to say "For this game, we're ignoring everything alignment-related" than to come up with the framework and support to insert them into the game, so it's better for D&D to have them by default and let people use them or not as they desire than to continue stripping them out of successive editions and leave those who do like and use alignments high and dry.

On 5e, yeah i can simply ignore them, but thats not true for other editions. Not unless i want to work a lot on the spells, which, not many people do, and shouldn't have to. I guess it would be allright to have alignment as an optional rule, but from what I am seeing less and less people are using them and for good reason, alignment is boring, and oversimplifies things.

Sindeloke
2015-05-26, 08:11 AM
Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor as 30+ in 3e? You're off your rocker. Each of them can easily be modeled with capabilities available to characters around levels 10-15. There is nothing that any of them do that makes them actually epic.

I don't have a rocker. It would probably get the cat's tail and we'd all be murdered in our sleep.

But find me a character of less than epic level who can survive a nuclear blast just as an inherent feature of his physiology and we'll talk about Hulk, who apart from having a Str score more accurately measured in the triple digits, is literally unkillable despite the best efforts of some of the most powerful people in both 616 and beyond. Thor can fly across galaxies and hear the prayers of his followers in the Simonson run, probably the most-read, best-regarded, most iconic piece of history the character has, so I'm not sure how the Superman problem applies. Tony you could admittedly do with a level 1 commoner with a high Int and Cha and an epic-level but low-Ego suit of artifact armor, but that seems like a bit of an unfair technicality. You really ought to require him to be able to build it.


Exactly, so when we get rid of alignment it won't be needed anymore, so everything is fine.

Well, I mean, it was never needed. It's certainly useful - both by providing mechanics for a certain style of gameplay, and creating a framework to help a group decide on and understand each other's goals, personalities, and dynamics - but given that hundreds of games don't have it, it's obviously not a keystone of dice rolling or anything, I don't think anyone would claim it was. Whether it's needed for D&D is maybe a more fraught question (everybody has a different opinion on which of the thousands of things D&D has done are required for D&D to "feel like D&D"), but I suspect that 6e and anything beyond it will do the same thing 5e has. IE, include it as a concept for the grognards, but stringently separate it from any mechanical impact so the people who hate it can ignore it. Which seems like a perfectly fine compromise to me, even if it makes detect evil/protection from evil sort of stupid.

Milo v3
2015-05-26, 08:17 AM
But find me a character of less than epic level who can survive a nuclear blast just as an inherent feature of his physiology and we'll talk about Hulk

Well, in PF any creature immune to poison, fire damage, and regeneration would survive it. Though, if you allowed it to not just be inherent feature of his physiology... rogues could survive them.

mephnick
2015-05-26, 10:57 AM
I feel a nuclear blast does most of it's damage in force. It's not the fireball that destroys everything.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-26, 12:17 PM
When I look at WoW vs. 4E I find three major sources of comparison:

All three of which I find highly objectionable.


1: Lack of Strategic Play

Being able to begin a fight with all the resources you could possible have doesn't mean there's no strategy to it, otherwise bosses wouldn't need guides like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUn6pBNiG-8). And I have no idea what you were doing while playing if you don't see a lot of strategic options in either game. In fact, you don't even start "every fight at full strength" in 4E, you are supposed to do 4-5 encounters per day (on days where you fight at all), dailies make a huge difference and managing healing surges is very important and you can easily run out of them very quickly, at which point your party needs a particular ritual to give you a few of their surges or you are unlikely to survive. Making an encounter sufficiently challenging may not be something you see all the time, but the monster/encounter design eventually shifted to a rather challenging paradigm, so the dull combats without threats were simply a feature of the early lifecycle of the game. Also, terribly balanced fights are the norm with the CR system as well. Oh and I almost forgot to mention the essentials line which gave characters less strategic options and was highly popular. People were asking for characters to "I hit it with my sword"-enemies every round, they didn't want options!



2: Class Rolls [sic]

Early WoW was more "bring whatever you can get", since you needed 40 players to fill your raid and doing stuff like Warlock's having to mana drain or banish on certain classes meant they got raid spots despite being otherwise only being good for curses, so specific roles can be a good thing, which sadly stopped being a paradigm for encoutner design until recently. Certain classes sucking and only being good at maybe one thing has nothing to do with it being an MMO and rather with class systems being hard to balance and the disparity between classes (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?PHPSESSID=i70h1hurduoapqj4543pv1g4r1&topic=5293) is in fact infinitely worse in other edition. You are blatently ignoring that "casters could pretty much do anything you wanted them to" and yet you complain that "a secondary role (just like early WoW), but never as good as a "pure" class"? A non-caster in 3.X simply can not be as good as a "pure"-can-do-anything-I-want-it-to-caster and the right hybrid build between a defender and a striker in 4E can easily be competent at both things and hold up in a party featuring optimized strikers not build for defending, other hybrids can also fare well and tanking isn't a thing in 4E. And effectiveness has very little to do with being a "pure" class, the best builds are typically hybrids that multiclass as well and there are strikers that can't really surpass charging wizards without resorting to cheese.



3: Lack of Realism

There are reasonable narrative explanations for everything you list, some of which are given in the books, so I don't find myself particularly compelled to go through them to find the references. Also, pot, kettle, older editions, etc.

Look, there are a lot of good reasons not to like 4E. I have plenty of them, but "it's like WoW" is not one of them and quite a few of which would be fixed if it were more similar to a game like WoW.

Hawkstar
2015-05-26, 12:19 PM
The morality of "killing evil people" depends on a variety of things, mostly what counts as "evil" to a degree that killing is appropriate. It's basically reasonable for there to be some groups of orcs you can killing (demon worshipers perhaps), but the general rule should probably be against killing sapients capable of making moral choices.Are orcs, goblins, drow, etc. actually capable of making moral choices, or is that a projection based on a few aberrant members (Such as Drizz't).

Alignment is here to stay, just like Armor Class and Saving Throws. They're iconic to D&D.


And back to Superheroes - A dude flying around blasting people with energy may be a 10th-level character concept, but that's not Iron Man. Characters don't actually change (Unless they're defined by low-level-game-breaking abilities, like Flight) as characters level up - only the scope and scale of their abilities change.

Starlord and Iron Man have similar 'powersets' - but Iron Man would be modeled at a MUCH higher level than Starlord: Peter Quill can't survive being stuck in a high-speed turbine for several rounds the way Iron Man can, nor does he have the sheer blasting power.

The difference between a level 5 fighter and a level 12 fighter against level 1 mooks is extremely difficult to see - but put them against level 5 mooks, and differences become EXTREMELY apparent.

Talakeal
2015-05-26, 12:48 PM
First, let me say that in a lot of ways 4E was just taking 3.X philosophies one step further. It was hardly alone in its sins and I am not saying earlier editions are blameless.

I don't think that 4E is exactly like WoW, but I do think that a lot of my biggest problems with WoW are also my biggest problems with 4E, and that both of them have these problems to a far greater extent than other similar games that I had previously played.




Being able to begin a fight with all the resources you could possible have doesn't mean there's no strategy to it, otherwise bosses wouldn't need guides like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUn6pBNiG-8).

I don't see how that is possible; forgive me If I am wrong but I think you might be confusing strategy with tactics.

Tactics is how you win a battle, strategy is deciding how many resources you will devote to a battle and managing those resources over the course of the campaign.

Unless you are talking about how you manage your resources during the fight (which I admit is a thing, but not what I am talking about when I mention strategic play) I am not seeing any element of strategic play in WoW, and aside from daily usage I don't see any in 4E either. While healing surges might run out (I have never seen it, but I haven't played a huge amount of 4E) they are still just a short nap away.

Watching the link you posted now, the only strategic talk I am seeing so far is talking about making sure you go into the phase transitions without adds up / people low on health.



Early WoW was more "bring whatever you can get", since you needed 40 players to fill your raid and doing stuff like Warlock's having to mana drain or banish on certain classes meant they got raid spots despite being otherwise only being good for curses, so specific roles can be a good thing, which sadly stopped being a paradigm for encoutner design until recently. Certain classes sucking and only being good at maybe one thing has nothing to do with it being an MMO and rather with class systems being hard to balance and the disparity between classes (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?PHPSESSID=i70h1hurduoapqj4543pv1g4r1&topic=5293) is in fact infinitely worse in other edition. You are blatently ignoring that "casters could pretty much do anything you wanted them to" and yet you complain that "a secondary role (just like early WoW), but never as good as a "pure" class"? A non-caster in 3.X simply can not be as good as a "pure"-can-do-anything-I-want-it-to-caster and the right hybrid build between a defender and a striker in 4E can easily be competent at both things and hold up in a party featuring optimized strikers not build for defending, other hybrids can also fare well and tanking isn't a thing in 4E. And effectiveness has very little to do with being a "pure" class, the best builds are typically hybrids that multiclass as well and there are strikers that can't really surpass charging wizards without resorting to cheese.


I fully agree that 3.X had borked balance. But that wasn't a goal of the game like it was in 4E. CoDzilla may have been a better tank / dps than the fighter, but that was not intentional and wasn't spelled out in the book. As you say, it is a failure in balancing classes.

4E actually made that a design goal, trying to give each role a distinct space and punishing people for trying to step outside of that role, just like WoW did (and according to some people still does) with their "hybrid tax" philosophy.

I played an arms warrior in vanilla, and though I was pretty good at it I always got the feeling I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and got a lot of abuse for even attempting it. In 2-3.5E I could play a greatsword fighter just fine, but when I tried doing that in 4E I got the exact same feeling as I had in WoW and the ranger and rogue were out damaging me without even trying.

Furthermore, playing a pacifist character is simple in earlier editions of D&D or even some MMOs like UO. It is virtually impossible in 4E or WoW, and though some people have pulled it off they had to jump through a lot of hoops to do so.



There are reasonable narrative explanations for everything you list, some of which are given in the books, so I don't find myself particularly compelled to go through them to find the references. Also, pot, kettle, older editions, etc.
.

I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree then.

To me it is plainly obvious that 4E is a lot less "simulationist" than AD&D and that WoW is a lot less "simulationist" than UO. But it is a matter of opinion, and if you don't want to bring up specific points we can leave it at that, just be aware that it is in fact a very common point of view and just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean that it is groundless.

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-05-26, 12:57 PM
Exactly, so when we get rid of alignment it won't be needed anymore, so everything is fine.

Except there are plenty of players, myself included, who like the kinds of stories it allows us to tell. If you run lots of high-fantasy campaigns, and particularly if you do lots of high-level plane-hopping in general or run Planescape in particular, alignment is kind of a big deal.

Saying that alignment should be ditched because you don't like it or understand why anyone would want it is like saying all martial classes should be ditched from D&D because they're weak and stupid and you can't understand why anyone would ever want to play one--your personal preferences for your own games should not override the desires of the playerbase, especially since it is vastly easier for you to simply ignore them and leave them for others to use than to take them out and make everyone who likes them remake them from scratch.


Never seen a character played by a player whose motivation to being a hero is: So i can relate to something greater than myself, BUT not a god, just good, the whole cosmic force of good.

So...you've never seen anyone play a paladin, then? 'Cause devoting themselves to the abstract ideals of Law and Good without serving a particular god is kinda their thing.


at this point, when we are discussig on a sixth edition of the game, don't really see why should we care about DnD starting as a wargame...

I mentioned it to explain why it was included in the first place, not as a supporting point for why it should remain included.


I like support to fightng or detecting devils, or angels. But the fact that a paladin can just walk to a person, detect evil on this person and say "EVIL!!!" is stupid.

Why? There are already spells to detect someone's attitude, creature type, religious leanings, reputation, level of guilt, level of health, surface thoughts, memories, exact location, past actions, future intentions, truthfulness, strengths and weaknesses, degree of magicalness, and spellcasting capabilities; detecting someone's moral outlooks seems like it fits in just fine.


do you treat Armor Class fairly seriously? As a game mechanic, of course, and so is alignment, nothing more than a game mechanic. the problem is that things like good and evil, are way deeper than that, and I don't see the use on making them overly simple.

One doesn't need to speak with one's group to determine how one views the moral and ethical implications of armor class. The fact that alignment has mechanical implications does not mean that it is treated overly simplistically; heck, discussions kicked off on this and other forums regarding alignment have been more in-depth than the discussions I've had in some philosophy classes.


On 5e, yeah i can simply ignore them, but thats not true for other editions. Not unless i want to work a lot on the spells, which, not many people do, and shouldn't have to.

...Seriously? "Any spell whose effect mentions or is dependent on alignment does not exist. Alignment restrictions and descriptors on classes, feats, and everything else do not exist." Ta-da, done. Alternately, "Everyone is treated as being true neutral but can take any class, feat, or anything else regardless of alignment restrictions." Ta-da, done again.


I guess it would be allright to have alignment as an optional rule, but from what I am seeing less and less people are using them and for good reason, alignment is boring, and oversimplifies things.

Whether it's needed for D&D is maybe a more fraught question (everybody has a different opinion on which of the thousands of things D&D has done are required for D&D to "feel like D&D"), but I suspect that 6e and anything beyond it will do the same thing 5e has. IE, include it as a concept for the grognards, but stringently separate it from any mechanical impact so the people who hate it can ignore it. Which seems like a perfectly fine compromise to me, even if it makes detect evil/protection from evil sort of stupid.

I cannot say this enough: It is much better to have such a widespread subsystem like alignment made a part of the base rules that is easily extracted or ignored than it is to build the system without it and shoehorn the subsystem in later.

5e was promised to be the most amazingly modular D&D game ever made. Everything would be modular and hot-swappable, you could turn the game into your favorite edition if you wanted, and everyone could make the game their own in a myriad of ways. Yes, including a module to make alignment trivial and flavor-only, mechanically impactful, or somewhere in between. Yet when 5e came out, we didn't see more than a handful of these amazing "modules," and all of the ones we did see were the same ones that have been showing up in the Unearthed Arcanas of previous editions for years. Why is that? Because making everything modular like that and having it actually work is really bleeping hard, if not impossible.

Take 4e. Remove healing surges. Replace any mention of healing an amount of HP equal to your healing surge value in powers with the healing values of the Potion of Cure Light Wounds (for heroic-tier healing) or Potion of Heal (for paragon- and epic-tier healing) to emulate 3e-style healing. Proceed to play the game as normal. Notice that one of the fundamental assumptions of the game is that you have a lot more healing oomph than those numbers provide and you just can't keep up anymore.

Take 3e. Remove Vancian spellcasting. Replace all mention of spell slots with equivalent point values to get a mana-based spellcasting system. Proceed to play the game as normal. Notice that one of the fundamental assumptions of the game is that you have a lot fewer top-level spells per day than spell points allow for and you easily wreck the opposition.

When spell points and alternate healing show up in UA, they're accompanied by the disclaimer that they're not playtested thoroughly, that they will likely combine in unforeseen ways with the rest of the game, and that it's entirely on the DM to make things balanced and functional. Doing that in the DMG with something like alignment, which is fairly low-impact as far as alternate subsystems go but is still quite far-reaching, is irresponsible and puts extra work on DMs who want to include it. It's also alienating to players; many people feel the way about gnomes that you two do about alignment, yet when 4e dropped without the gnome in the PHB plenty of players said they wouldn't consider switching until they were included, even though you could kinda sorta play one by using the gnome in the back on the MM.

I cannot say this enough: It is much better to have such a widespread subsystem like alignment made a part of the base rules that is easily extracted or ignored than it is to build the system without it and shoehorn the subsystem in later.

C-Dude
2015-05-26, 01:27 PM
Secondary skills were folded into non-adventuring-relevant Nonweapon Proficiencies in 2e, and then into the Craft/Knowledge/Perform/Profession quartet of skills in 3e. As far as "commoner levels" go, non-important NPCs in AD&D were "0th-level humanoids" and, if desired, PCs could be started off at that point, and 3.0 had rules for 0th-level characters and 1st-level multiclassing in the DMG.

It's funny...after many people lauded 4e for ditching the "useless" non-adventuring-relevant background stuff (the codifying of which, by the way, a lot of people said was purely a 3e invention) and scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever need rules for roleplaying (perish the thought!), 5e is lauded for the "new" and "ingenious" idea of backgrounds that have been in the game since the start and were so loudly decried a mere handful of years before. Everything old is new again, huh? :smallwink:

Huh, I guess I missed that. My older brother used to run 2e and I don't remember him putting much weight into character backgrounds. He may have been glossing over it or I may not have noticed it (I was a little kid at the time). Then the longest running campaign I participated in was 4e, where backgrounds weren't really a thing.
Well, you learn something everyday!

Segev
2015-05-26, 01:59 PM
6e will be a set of apps rather than a set of books and will let everybody play on their phones, using bluetooth connections to sync up and run all the roll-at-the-table mechanics automatically.

:smallwink:

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-26, 02:36 PM
6e will be a set of apps rather than a set of books and will let everybody play on their phones, using bluetooth connections to sync up and run all the roll-at-the-table mechanics automatically.

:smallwink:

The grognards would go berserk. There'd be rioting in the streets. :smalleek:

Lord Raziere
2015-05-26, 02:40 PM
The grognards would go berserk. There'd be rioting in the streets. :smalleek:

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c135/BimmerR/grumpy-cat-good-1_zpsfd027e26.jpg (http://s26.photobucket.com/user/BimmerR/media/grumpy-cat-good-1_zpsfd027e26.jpg.html)

SpectralDerp
2015-05-26, 03:57 PM
Tactics is how you win a battle, strategy is deciding how many resources you will devote to a battle and managing those resources over the course of the campaign.

Unless you are talking about how you manage your resources during the fight (which I admit is a thing, but not what I am talking about when I mention strategic play) I am not seeing any element of strategic play in WoW, and aside from daily usage I don't see any in 4E either. While healing surges might run out (I have never seen it, but I haven't played a huge amount of 4E) they are still just a short nap away.

Actually, strategy includes all planning, a tactic is a short-term decision. Also, if I'm a fighter in 3.X, what's my strategy? Which resources to I have to manage? The healing spells of the cleric in my group? And healing surges are actually "one 6 hour break at most once a day" away, which is not what any sane person calls "a short nap".


4E actually made that a design goal, trying to give each role a distinct space and punishing people for trying to step outside of that role, just like WoW did (and according to some people still does) with their "hybrid tax" philosophy.

I played an arms warrior in vanilla, and though I was pretty good at it I always got the feeling I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and got a lot of abuse for even attempting it. In 2-3.5E I could play a greatsword fighter just fine, but when I tried doing that in 4E I got the exact same feeling as I had in WoW and the ranger and rogue were out damaging me without even trying.

Hybrids in 4E have top-tier builds that make pure classes look poor in comparisons, especially fighters. Warriors were also the best dps class in vanilla WoW, the spec you should have played was fury instead. Arms sucked like almost everything else, including all 3 dps specs that warlocks had available. My job was to cast Curse of Elements every 5 minutes because warriors were better, gg.
And no, WoW doesn't force anyone in any role, the last expansion introduced the monk class which did well in 3 roles, which is 3 roles more than the 3.X monk did. Druids have 4 available specs, their ranged dps spec is better than all 3 ranged dps specs available to warlocks, which were briefly overpowered and are currently just bad. Death Knights have pretty much always been fantastic dps and tanks, every spec has been great at one point. The notion that WoW forces classes into certain roles is nonsensical, they are trying to balance everything, they just aren't too great at it.



I fully agree that 3.X had borked balance. But that wasn't a goal of the game like it was in 4E. CoDzilla may have been a better tank / dps than the fighter, but that was not intentional and wasn't spelled out in the book. As you say, it is a failure in balancing classes.

"I dislike the disparity between classes, except in games with the worst disparity of all time which I like"

Talakeal
2015-05-26, 04:49 PM
Actually, strategy includes all planning, a tactic is a short-term decision. Also, if I'm a fighter in 3.X, what's my strategy? Which resources to I have to manage? The healing spells of the cleric in my group? And healing surges are actually "one 6 hour break at most once a day" away, which is not what any sane person calls "a short nap".
"

I am not seeing any dictionary or encyclopedia article which lists all planning as strategy, but as a wise man said "once one person starts quoting dictionaries at the other person reasonable debate is over", so rather than argue semantics please just imagine I said "Resource management over the course of the entire dungeon / adventure / raid" in my initial post in place of strategy and my point stands.

As to your question about fighters; the group as a whole has to manage everyone's HP, everyone's spell slots, charges from magic items, consumable magic items, and in more gritty games mundane things like lamp oil, rations, arrows, etc..

If you are purely looking at a fighter's solo combat role strategy pretty much boils down to HPs, which isn't a lot, but you aren't playing in a vacuum and the fighter's tactics will influence how many resources everyone else is expending. If a avoid an injury that is a healing spell the cleric doesn't have to cast, if I kill a group of goblins with great cleave that is a fireball the wizard doesn't have to cast, and if decide whether or not to take a hit for someone else that is choosing how to allocate the entire parties HP.



Hybrids in 4E have top-tier builds that make pure classes look poor in comparisons, especially fighters. Warriors were also the best dps class in vanilla WoW, the spec you should have played was fury instead. Arms sucked like almost everything else, including all 3 dps specs that warlocks had available. My job was to cast Curse of Elements every 5 minutes because warriors were better, gg.
And no, WoW doesn't force anyone in any role, the last expansion introduced the monk class which did well in 3 roles, which is 3 roles more than the 3.X monk did. Druids have 4 available specs, their ranged dps spec is better than all 3 ranged dps specs available to warlocks, which were briefly overpowered and are currently just bad. Death Knights have pretty much always been fantastic dps and tanks, every spec has been great at one point. The notion that WoW forces classes into certain roles is nonsensical, they are trying to balance everything, they just aren't too great at it."


I totally agree, current WoW does not try and force people into specific roles.

But it certainly did up until ~WoTLK (which was released after D&D 4e was). When 4E first came out it was after three+ years of being kicked from groups, berated from playing wrong, and told to shut up and tank / heal. In my vanilla raid guild I was always top of the DPS meters, yet I still had to throw on a shield and OT during the vast majority of boss fights, and my shadow priest friend was NEVER allowed to dps because healers were in such demand (and shadow priests really kind of sucked outside of PvP at the time).




"I dislike the disparity between classes, except in games with the worst disparity of all time which I like"

It is mostly a matter of intent. 4E is the first edition to actually label roles, something I had been seeing in MMOs for years but never in table top games. That certainly, to me, speaks of an MMO like mindset.

I totally agree that 3E is terribly balanced and many classes were horribly broken, but they weren't designed that way. Useless monks and caster supremacy was a bug, not a feature. Classes having clearly defined roles and struggling outside of them is clearly a conscious decision of 4E, and I would hazard a guess that if there is a hybrid build that tops damage in 4E it is every bit as unintended as CoDzilla was in 3E.

I don't like class disparity in any game, and I don't like it in 3E, hell I haven't even played a non e6 game of 3E since before WoW even existed. So I don't know why you are putting words in my mouth and saying that I like class disparity in 3E or 3E as a whole. True I prefer 3E to 4E, but I much prefer AD&D to either of them.

Milo v3
2015-05-26, 04:58 PM
I feel a nuclear blast does most of it's damage in force. It's not the fireball that destroys everything.
Thus the regeneration. Means you wont die from the bludgeon damage. As long as your regeneration doesn't get stopped by fire or bludgeon your fine from the nuke, though you'll need poison resistance/immunity or a good fort to ignore the radiation poisoning.


And back to Superheroes - A dude flying around blasting people with energy may be a 10th-level character concept, but that's not Iron Man. Characters don't actually change (Unless they're defined by low-level-game-breaking abilities, like Flight) as characters level up - only the scope and scale of their abilities change.

Starlord and Iron Man have similar 'powersets' - but Iron Man would be modeled at a MUCH higher level than Starlord: Peter Quill can't survive being stuck in a high-speed turbine for several rounds the way Iron Man can, nor does he have the sheer blasting power.

Iron Man is pretty obviously just a high level artificer, nothing more, nothing less. Starlord would probably just be a fighter or rogue.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-26, 05:32 PM
I am not seeing any dictionary or encyclopedia article which lists all planning as strategy, but as a wise man said "once one person starts quoting dictionaries at the other person reasonable debate is over", so rather than argue semantics please just imagine I said "Resource management over the course of the entire dungeon / adventure / raid" in my initial post in place of strategy and my point stands.

No it doesn't, a fighter in 4E has to manage everone's healing surges, everyone's dailies, charges from magic items, consumable magic items, and in more gritty games mundane things like lamp oil, rations, arrows, etc.



I totally agree, current WoW does not try and force people into specific roles.

But it certainly did up until ~WoTLK (which was released after D&D 4e was). When 4E first came out it was after three+ years of being kicked from groups, berated from playing wrong, and told to shut up and tank / heal. In my vanilla raid guild I was always top of the DPS meters, yet I still had to throw on a shield and OT during the vast majority of boss fights, and my shadow priest friend was NEVER allowed to dps because healers were in such demand (and shadow priests really kind of sucked outside of PvP at the time).

Nonsense! Paladins and druids became viable tanks, paladins were the best raid healers rather than buff-bots, shadow priests were amazing, warlocks stopped sucking, TBC pretty much increased viability across the board.



Classes having clearly defined roles and struggling outside of them is clearly a conscious decision of 4E, and I would hazard a guess that if there is a hybrid build that tops damage in 4E it is every bit as unintended as CoDzilla was in 3E.

So it's unintended that fighters have "attack a bunch of times" powers? Really?

I thin I'm done here, your willingness to pontificate nonsense about things you aren't familiar with is just getting disgusting.

Talakeal
2015-05-26, 06:08 PM
No it doesn't, a fighter in 4E has to manage everone's healing surges, everyone's dailies, charges from magic items, consumable magic items, and in more gritty games mundane things like lamp oil, rations, arrows, etc.



Nonsense! Paladins and druids became viable tanks, paladins were the best raid healers rather than buff-bots, shadow priests were amazing, warlocks stopped sucking, TBC pretty much increased viability across the board.



So it's unintended that fighters have "attack a bunch of times" powers? Really?

I thin I'm done here, your willingness to pontificate nonsense about things you aren't familiar with is just getting disgusting.

I dont know why you are getting so worked up over this, especially when I am agreeing with most of what you are saying and everything is all just subjective opinion anyway.

I completely agree that paladins and druids became much better tanks and healers in TBC, although their DPS was iirc still pretty lacking and their end game role was once again relegated to healbot. And yeah, warlocks got a huge boost. Didnt play a priest in TBC so I will have to take your word about them.
But as a dps warrior, I went from top dps and OT in my guild in vanilla to being kicked from the guild as a "waste of a raid spot" and not even being invited to heroics due to lack of CC abilities.

Again, I am not an expert in 4e, and am not trying to sound like I am, I am merely trying to share my perspective on why I liked WoW but disliked 4e based on my expperiances from reading and playing both games.

i am genunly asking, do you really find that having healing surges and daily powers on a long coldown rest provides the same level of resource management as earlier editions where it would take a full day (at minimum) to recover all spells and would take days if not weeks to recover HP?
Also, are there actually defender or leader powers that have the same damage output as striker powers? If that is actually the case, why bother labelling them as defenders or leaders in the first place?

zinycor
2015-05-26, 08:45 PM
Saying that alignment should be ditched because you don't like it or understand why anyone would want it is like saying all martial classes should be ditched from D&D because they're weak and stupid and you can't understand why anyone would ever want to play one--your personal preferences for your own games should not override the desires of the playerbase, especially since it is vastly easier for you to simply ignore them and leave them for others to use than to take them out and make everyone who likes them remake them from scratch.



Am not willing to continue discussing with you if you are just going to make my opinion seems like am a little kid who likes to whine.

Have a good day.

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-05-26, 09:04 PM
Am not willing to continue discussing with you if you are just going to make my opinion seems like am a little kid who likes to whine.

Have a good day.

I'm not sure why you think I'm characterizing your arguments as whining. I made an analogous point about fighters being "boring and stupid" and you not seeing why anyone would want it because that's exactly what you've been saying about alignment:


But for more complex games which require to make hard decisions having the DM tell you: "And now you are evil, cause the rules says so!!!" it's damn stupid.


I guess is posible, but i don't really see the value on it.
[...]
But the fact that a paladin can just walk to a person, detect evil on this person and say "EVIL!!!" is stupid.
[...]
alignment is boring, and oversimplifies things.

My point is not to make you seem like a whiner, but rather to try to show that even if you personally are vehemently against something in your games, that's not a good argument for removing it because other people may like it just fine. If you want to drop the topic, though, I'm fine agreeing to disagree.

1Forge
2015-05-27, 12:00 AM
They wont go 6e they're gonna settle down like pathfinder with 3.5 and settle down with D&D 5.5e where they will constantly release new content till theirs too many rule books to count.:smallbiggrin: And thus buisness.

Yora
2015-05-27, 04:50 AM
I don't see a 6th edition happening within the next 10 years either. And I wouldn't be surprised if it never comes at all.

But so far they have not really shown any hints of producing an endless stream of rulebooks. It's been almost 10 months now and I think there hasn't been any new rulebook since the three default ones.

Milo v3
2015-05-27, 05:07 AM
I don't see a 6th edition happening within the next 10 years either. And I wouldn't be surprised if it never comes at all.

But so far they have not really shown any hints of producing an endless stream of rulebooks. It's been almost 10 months now and I think there hasn't been any new rulebook since the three default ones.

There was a supplement. Added in elemental races and spells.

JAL_1138
2015-05-27, 06:58 AM
There was a supplement. Added in elemental races and spells.

Although it was part of a particular campaign module, rather than a new hardback rulebook (or even softback splatbook a'la Complete Whatever's Handbooks).

I may be wrong but while I like 5th fine it has enough problematic spots (beastmaster ranger, vaguely worded spells/feats/class features) that I suspect there'll be a Revised Edition. Whether it's as minimal a revision as the '95 "black border" printing of 2e, or a full-on 5.5, I dunno, but I think we'll see it in 3-5 years. That will probably stave off a 6e for a while.

Segev
2015-05-27, 08:40 AM
Oh, I fully expect a 6e, in all seriousness. But not for a decade, at least. 5.5 will come out in 5-10 years. They may not call it that, but there will be a "revised" or "updated" or "remastered" or "rules cyclopedia updated edition" or the like in that time. 5-10 years after that, we'll see a 6e. RPGs typically have a ~5-10 year development cycle, depending on how many supplements they can release.

It's been 15 years since 3.0. We're just now starting 5e, and it's generally acknowledged that 3.5e was...premature. 4e never really got a 4.5, but that is, I think, because it was determined that too much of the audience was turning to PF to want to refine the existing rule set rather than develop a new one to try to get them back.

Flickerdart
2015-05-27, 09:47 AM
They wont go 6e they're gonna settle down like pathfinder with 3.5 and settle down with D&D 5.5e where they will constantly release new content till theirs too many rule books to count.:smallbiggrin: And thus buisness.
That's not really how business works. It's much more profitable to keep releasing new systems and then splats for those systems.

SpectralDerp
2015-05-27, 09:56 AM
I dont know why you are getting so worked up over this, especially when I am agreeing with most of what you are saying and everything is all just subjective opinion anyway.

I'm getting worked up over this because your arguments are nothing but bigotry in motion. You have no problem assigning whatever intent you are ready to condemn to developers of games you dislike and your grasp on anything related to facts let's a lot to be desired. I find it absolutely baffling that people are so desperate to cling to nonsense like "4E is like WoW" when there are numerous actually valid reasons to dislike the game and yet the people who are the quickest to criticize it never actually give any, simply because they actually require familiarity with the system and time spent there can't be invested in posting precious one-liners in edition-wars.

Talakeal
2015-05-27, 11:56 AM
I'm getting worked up over this because your arguments are nothing but bigotry in motion. You have no problem assigning whatever intent you are ready to condemn to developers of games you dislike and your grasp on anything related to facts let's a lot to be desired. I find it absolutely baffling that people are so desperate to cling to nonsense like "4E is like WoW" when there are numerous actually valid reasons to dislike the game and yet the people who are the quickest to criticize it never actually give any, simply because they actually require familiarity with the system and time spent there can't be invested in posting precious one-liners in edition-wars.

Again, you are taking this WAY to seriously.


"Bigotry" is a bit heavy of a word when talking about video games. It is also an inappropriate one, the dictionary defines bigotry as "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own".

At no point did I say you or anyone else's opinions are wrong or invalid, although you did when you stated that my opinions were "objectionable" and then decided to try and debunk them. All I did was state my comparison and then try and support it with the facts as I understand them.

I also don't know why you insist that I don't know what I am talking about. I played WoW for over 10 years of real time and have well over 500 days of playtime accumulated. I like WoW quite a bit, and find it by far the best MMO ever released.

While I don't care for 4E and don't have nearly as much playtime, I have read both the 3 core books and the essentials set cover to cover and have played in 4 separate 4E campaigns. True, I am not an expert, but I have enough familiarity to notice that a lot of the design decisions behind the game's development are similar to WoWs.

There were numerous people requesting to hear someone who actually liked WoW compare it to 4E, and I was trying to speak to them and give my opinions on where the biggest points of comparison are. That's all. I am not trying to prove that 4E is an inferior game or that people who like it are wrong or stupid.



If you like I could boil my argument down to something even simpler:

In my opinion both World of Warcraft and 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons focus on challenging tactical combats where every fight matters rather than long term resource management over the course of the game, both have a strong ingrained notion that characters will fit into predefined roles in the party, and both believe that a fun and balanced game experience is a higher priority than perfectly simulating the workings of a fictional world.

Psyren
2015-05-27, 12:06 PM
While I don't care for 4E and don't have nearly as much playtime, I have read both the 3 core books and the essentials set cover to cover and have played in 4 separate 4E campaigns. True, I am not an expert, but I have enough familiarity to notice that a lot of the design decisions behind the game's development are similar to WoWs.

There were numerous people requesting to hear someone who actually liked WoW compare it to 4E, and I was trying to speak to them and give my opinions on where the biggest points of comparison are. That's all. I am not trying to prove that 4E is an inferior game or that people who like it are wrong or stupid.



If you like I could boil my argument down to something even simpler:

In my opinion both World of Warcraft and 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons focus on challenging tactical combats where every fight matters rather than long term resource management over the course of the game, both have a strong ingrained notion that characters will fit into predefined rolls in the party, and both believe that a fun and balanced game experience is a higher priority that perfectly simulating the workings of a fictional world.

I can find nothing objectionable in any of this.

Segev
2015-05-27, 01:10 PM
I can find nothing objectionable in any of this.

We're going to have to revoke your Internet. Not finding something objectionable in a forum post is a sign that you don't belong there. :smalltongue:

Vitruviansquid
2015-05-27, 04:16 PM
Yeah... I don't see why you'd get worked up over whether 3.5 is like WoW...

But here's the reason it's still kind of annoying. It's pretty common to see 3.5 players to look at other games and say "there's this feature in my game that does X, and since that other game does not have the same feature, X must not be done in that other game." You see it in the bounded accuracy argument upthread. In 3.5, heroes are made to feel powerful by their ability to kill enemies literally nobody else can touch because unbounded accuracy makes it so a commoner can't realistically even touch a dragon. Thus springs the argument that in 5th edition, heroes are not powerful because a commoner can deal some damage to a dragon. In other words "There's unbounded accuracy in my game that makes heroes feel powerful, and since 5th edition does not have unbounded accuracy, heroes must not feel powerful in it." Which is ridiculous, because 5th edition's heroes *do* feel powerful - they just do it by features other than having unbounded accuracy.


The arguments that 4e is close to WoW is the same way. 3.5 players look at 4e and say, "there's this feature in my game that isn't in WoW, and this other game has a feature that *was* in WoW, therefore that other game must've taken design cues from WoW."

Here an example: "Earlier editions of D&D like to keep up the appearance of a consistent world. Most every power in the game has an explanation, and they try and keep consistent with known real world laws (or consistent fantasy world laws). Things have explanations and generally follow common sense."

So in 3.5, the realism is achieved when a wizard casts Fly, and you have no magic and no ranged weapons, then you're boned. Or, say, the fact that magic users who can bend the laws of reality would always be stronger than someone who couldn't (if you cite realism for different reasons, please correct me). So 4e doesn't have all those features that 3.5 uses to feel realistic. But does it really mean 4e is less realistic? No, when you understand that 4e also has its own features for realism that weren't in 3.5. For example, 4e's encounter powers simulate how the same trick won't work on an enemy multiple times in a fight whereas 3.5 has that unrealistic thing where a dude will spend an entire fight just tripping enemies, and those enemies won't somehow adapt against it. If I was trying to prove that 3.5 is closer to WoW than 4e is, I would cite that in WoW, a rogue can use the same dirty tricks against an opponent ad infinitum, and since 3.5 characters can do the same thing while 4e characters can't, it's obvious that 3.5 took design cues from WoW while 4e moved away from it.

Here's another example: "4E comes along and gives everyone clearly defined roles, both in intent and practice. It is the first edition to actually spell out roles in the book. While there are a few cases where you can be OK at a secondary role (just like early WoW), but never as good as a "pure" class. Furthermore the game really doesn't reward unusual builds. Playing against type has gotten harder and harder in each edition of D&D. The 3E skill and saving throw system was really bad in this regard, but 4E made it worse."

So you look at 3.5, and the way that game allows people to play a multiple types within one class is by having a lot of different spells that do a lot of different things accessible to each caster (non-casters, of course, have no role). Since 4e doesn't have that, it's easy to then conclude that you have to play within type for every 4e class. Alternately, you can look at 4e and see that all classes have subclasses that can move them to different secondary roles or change the way they execute primary roles, so 4e is much better at letting you play multiple types within one class.


It's all quite pointless in the end, and to illustrate this, let's make that Bizarro World argument for how 3.5 somehow predicted WoW and copied its design, while 4e moves away from WoW.

1. Healing in 3.5 and WoW are based on the healer's resource, whereas healing in 4e is based on the healee's resource.

This sounds like a nitpick, but actually changes the dynamics of the game a lot. In 4e, your ability to keep adventuring will absolutely be stopped if your Defender takes too much damage over multiple fights, because he will run out of healing surges (the healee's resource) to be healed any more. This means a 4e party wants to distribute the damage it takes to the proportion that each party member can take damage in order to maximize their ability to keep adventuring in a day. In WoW, of course, this is different. You want your tank to take all the damage because it is more efficient for the healer to heal him, because he mitigates more damage. This is the same in a 3.5 party where enemies are ideally fighting the PC with the most defenses, because it'd be faster to run your healing character out of healing spells if everybody's taking damage, since your most defensive character can't run out of healing surges.


2. 3.5 and WoW classes have different resource systems, whereas 4e characters all use the same resource system (until PHB3)

In 3.5 and WoW, different classes use different resource systems. 3.5 has the wizard using Vancian magic, the sorcerer being able to decide which spell to cast on the fly, the fighter having no resource, and so on. In WoW, the Warrior has to build up rage, the Priest has to keep himself from running out of mana, and the Rogue can dump a lot of energy when a fight starts, but slows down over the fight. In both systems we see that the intent of the design is to make playing different classes harder to learn if you started on a class with a different resource system. 4e simplifies all that and makes for a smoother transition between different classes by having them all stick to the At-will/Encounter/Daily powers system.


3. In 3.5 and WoW, levels are basically meaningless, whereas in 4e, the level is an accurate assessment of how strong a character is.

In WoW, a level 40 character can be equipped in full green gear and be in the same group as a level 40 character in full blue gear (and some epics). At the highest level, there can be a tremendous amount of variance for how statistically strong a character is because raiding means there is a broad spectrum of power in their gear, from a max level character who just got there to a max level character who has cleared all the game's content. In 3.5, this is kind of the same, except the difference rests on class, so a level 10 wizard is much stronger than a level 10 fighter. Before 4e came out, WotC clearly saw that people were talking about their characters' power by saying how high level they were, and clearly they decided to finally move away from WoW's wacky levels by setting strict guidelines to make the level indicate more or less exactly how powerful a character is.

Talakeal
2015-05-27, 04:35 PM
Yeah... I don't see why you'd get worked up over whether 3.5 is like WoW...

But here's the reason it's kind of annoying. It's pretty common to see 3.5 players to look at other games and say "there's this feature in my game that does X, and since that other game does not have the same feature, X must not be done in that other game." You see it in the bounded accuracy argument upthread. In 3.5, heroes are made to feel powerful by their ability to kill enemies literally nobody else can touch because unbounded accuracy makes it so a commoner can't realistically even touch a dragon. Thus springs the argument that in 5th edition, heroes are not powerful because a commoner can deal some damage to a dragon. In other words "There's unbounded accuracy in my game that makes heroes feel powerful, and since 5th edition does not have unbounded accuracy, heroes must not feel powerful in it." Which is ridiculous, because 5th edition's heroes *do* feel powerful - they just do it by features other than having unbounded accuracy.


The arguments that 4e is close to WoW is the same way. 3.5 players look at 4e and say, "there's this feature in my game that isn't in WoW, and this other game has a feature that *was* in WoW, therefore that other game must've taken design cues from WoW."

Here an example: "Earlier editions of D&D like to keep up the appearance of a consistent world. Most every power in the game has an explanation, and they try and keep consistent with known real world laws (or consistent fantasy world laws). Things have explanations and generally follow common sense."

So in 3.5, the realism is achieved when a wizard casts Fly, and you have no magic and no ranged weapons, then you're boned. Or, say, the fact that magic users who can bend the laws of reality would always be stronger than someone who couldn't (if you cite realism for different reasons, please correct me). So 4e doesn't have all those features that 3.5 uses to feel realistic. But does it really mean 4e is less realistic? No, when you understand that 4e also has its own features for realism that weren't in 3.5. For example, 4e's encounter powers simulate how the same trick won't work on an enemy multiple times in a fight whereas 3.5 has that unrealistic thing where a dude will spend an entire fight just tripping enemies, and those enemies won't somehow adapt against it. If I was trying to prove that 3.5 is closer to WoW than 4e is, I would cite that in WoW, a rogue can use the same dirty tricks against an opponent ad infinitum, and since 3.5 characters can do the same thing while 4e characters can't, it's obvious that 3.5 took design cues from WoW while 4e moved away from it.

Here's another example: "4E comes along and gives everyone clearly defined roles, both in intent and practice. It is the first edition to actually spell out roles in the book. While there are a few cases where you can be OK at a secondary role (just like early WoW), but never as good as a "pure" class. Furthermore the game really doesn't reward unusual builds. Playing against type has gotten harder and harder in each edition of D&D. The 3E skill and saving throw system was really bad in this regard, but 4E made it worse."

So you look at 3.5, and the way that game allows people to play a multiple types within one class is by having a lot of different spells that do a lot of different things accessible to each caster (non-casters, of course, have no role). Since 4e doesn't have that, it's easy to then conclude that you have to play within type for every 4e class. Alternately, you can look at 4e and see that all classes have subclasses that can move them to different secondary roles or change the way they execute primary roles, so 4e is much better at letting you play multiple types within one class.


It's all quite pointless in the end, and to illustrate this, let's make that Bizarro World argument for how 3.5 somehow predicted WoW and copied its design, while 4e moves away from WoW.

1. Healing in 3.5 and WoW are based on the healer's resource, whereas healing in 4e is based on the healee's resource.

This sounds like a nitpick, but actually changes the dynamics of the game a lot. In 4e, your ability to keep adventuring will absolutely be stopped if your Defender takes too much damage over multiple fights, because he will run out of healing surges (the healee's resource) to be healed any more. This means a 4e party wants to distribute the damage it takes to the proportion that each party member can take damage in order to maximize their ability to keep adventuring in a day. In WoW, of course, this is different. You want your tank to take all the damage because it is more efficient for the healer to heal him, because he mitigates more damage. This is the same in a 3.5 party where enemies are ideally fighting the PC with the most defenses, because it'd be faster to run your healing character out of healing spells if everybody's taking damage, since your most defensive character can't run out of healing surges.


2. 3.5 and WoW classes have different resource systems, whereas 4e characters all use the same resource system (until PHB3)

In 3.5 and WoW, different classes use different resource systems. 3.5 has the wizard using Vancian magic, the sorcerer being able to decide which spell to cast on the fly, the fighter having no resource, and so on. In WoW, the Warrior has to build up rage, the Priest has to keep himself from running out of mana, and the Rogue can dump a lot of energy when a fight starts, but slows down over the fight. In both systems we see that the intent of the design is to make playing different classes harder to learn if you started on a class with a different resource system. 4e simplifies all that and makes for a smoother transition between different classes by having them all stick to the At-will/Encounter/Daily powers system.


3. In 3.5 and WoW, levels are basically meaningless, whereas in 4e, the level is an accurate assessment of how strong a character is.

In WoW, a level 40 character can be equipped in full green gear and be in the same group as a level 40 character in full blue gear (and some epics). At the highest level, there can be a tremendous amount of variance for how statistically strong a character is because raiding means there is a broad spectrum of power in their gear, from a max level character who just got there to a max level character who has cleared all the game's content. In 3.5, this is kind of the same, except the difference rests on class, so a level 10 wizard is much stronger than a level 10 fighter. Before 4e came out, WotC clearly saw that people were talking about their characters' power by saying how high level they were, and clearly they decided to finally move away from WoW's wacky levels by setting strict guidelines to make the level indicate more or less exactly how powerful a character is.

Ultimately comparing things is going to be subjective. One person can say I think 3.5 is closer to WoW because of X Y and Z and another person can say I think 4e is closer to WoW because of A B and C. Neither person is really wrong.

It is a bit like arguing whether a platypus more closely resembles a bird or a mammal; one person will fixate on the warm blood and milk while another will focus on the beak and laying eggs.


Case in point, your argument about tripping is precisely the opposite of how I feel. In my experiance I can do something over and over, and although as I get tired and sore, and my opponent gets better at predicitng my movements, it gets slightly harder over time, but it takes a very long time (or a sudden injury) for me to get to the point where I cant even attempt something again, and even if I do get to the point a change in my motivation can get me to do something I previously thought I couldn't.

The idea that once I do something, and not a particularly exotic something at that, that I will no longer be able to do it again period no matter what regardless of circumstances end of story until I take a five minute rest is a heck of a lot less realistic to me than 3e failing to account for mounting fatigue and enemies predicting my moves.

Although I do agree 3.x has terrible support for martial manuevers and 4e really did need to implement some system for it, I just find that the particular system they implemented was a step in the wrong direction.

Segev
2015-05-27, 04:58 PM
I will say that the idea that 4e is emulating WoW has always stricken me as more a desire to associate two things those doing the association dislike than to actually be an accurate reflection of 4e's merits or flaws.

Note: I am not a fan of 4e or WoW. I would not enjoy playing either.

However, 4e has more roots in one specific book in 3.5e than it does in WoW: The Book of Nine Swords. The universal mechanics that govern class features are based on maneuvers.

That, ultimately, is its fatal flaw, to my mind. There's nothing wrong with maneuvers; in fact, having them be the "fighter-types' schtick" would have been an excellent basis for making the caster/fighter/rogue paradigm have distinct mechanics for casters vs. fighters (though rogue-types still would need something better-developed than skills currently are in any edition). However, 4e made everybody into a martial adept, mechanically. While this made for easier balancing of the game, and I'm sure the tactical options were varied and deep for the combat simulator, and it's a perfectly fine fantasy game...it wasn't D&D. It failed to capture the "feel" of D&D. Something 5e has done a lot to reclaim, actually, while still distinctly being different from 2e and 3e.

Of course, that's mostly subjective, but there is some objective truth to it at the core; the immense reaction of the fan base in sharing this view means there's something to it. Edition wars always happen, but 4e was the first base-breaker that didn't heal itself over after people had time to get used to the idea of a new edition. Something was "off" about it as a D&D game.

This had nothing, however, to do with any similarity to WoW, and more to do with the extreme dissimilarity to some essential "D&Dness" of all the other D&D editions (and PF). I suspect, if I could identify it more precisely and accurately than merely "'everybody is a martial adept' isn't D&D," I could make a much more cogent argument. As it stands, you're free to disagree with me if you think I'm full of it and that 4e was every bit the D&D game that any other edition was. Though if you do so, consider this: what about 4e did you like in 3e and 2e and do you see shining through in 5e?

Talakeal
2015-05-27, 05:08 PM
It's all quite pointless in the end, and to illustrate this, let's make that Bizarro World argument for how 3.5 somehow predicted WoW and copied its design, while 4e moves away from WoW.
is.

You dont need to go too far into Bizarro land for this. Both 3.5 and WoW are both rather obviously descended from original dungeons and dragons, albeit along seperate evolutionary paths.

Therefore comparing things that occur in both 3.5 and WoW is incredibly easy as there is so much to choose from.

Saying WoW is like d&d is not really saying snything of significance because it is well known. To really make this comparison work you would have to find places where both 3.X and WoW have diverged from earlier D&D in the same manner.

Lord Raziere
2015-05-27, 05:22 PM
Saying WoW is like d&d is not really saying snything of significance because it is well known. To really make this comparison work you would have to find places where both 3.X and WoW have diverged from earlier D&D in the same manner.

Which I would argue against. I hate DnD 3.5 and like WoW, mostly because WoW isn't like DnD in that the horde is an actual good faction of the setting- or at least as morally grey as the Alliance- that I can play it without any guilt or Drizzt bull, and the mages there are mostly just blasters with ice and fire magic, and you get to summon demons without this actually impacting your morality at all. want to be a demonic warlock who joins all the good factions like the Argent Dawn, made up of holy people who fight undead, as well as the Cenarion Circle druids who recently FOUGHT AGAINST DEMONS? done, you even get cool mounts from them! want to be a death knight who wields necromantic magic while in heavy armor and a sword? you can be that, no morality or alignment bull to get in your way, and your entire origin story is saying SCREW THE LICH KING! and doing your own thing. as a roleplayer there is an appeal to WoW that DnD will never have: its called "more than two sides" and "moral complexity beyond This Thing Always Good and This Thing Always Bad" also I get to do cool stuff that DnD would guilt trip me for. so....

Talakeal
2015-05-27, 05:31 PM
Which I would argue against. I hate DnD 3.5 and like WoW, mostly because WoW isn't like DnD in that the horde is an actual good faction of the setting- or at least as morally grey as the Alliance- that I can play it without any guilt or Drizzt bull, and the mages there are mostly just blasters with ice and fire magic, and you get to summon demons without this actually impacting your morality at all. want to be a demonic warlock who joins all the good factions like the Argent Dawn, made up of holy people who fight undead, as well as the Cenarion Circle druids who recently FOUGHT AGAINST DEMONS? done, you even get cool mounts from them! want to be a death knight who wields necromantic magic while in heavy armor and a sword? you can be that, no morality or alignment bull to get in your way, and your entire origin story is saying SCREW THE LICH KING! and doing your own thing. as a roleplayer there is an appeal to WoW that DnD will never have: its called "more than two sides" and "moral complexity beyond This Thing Always Good and This Thing Always Bad" also I get to do cool stuff that DnD would guilt trip me for. so....

I 100 percent agree that D&Ds morality system is too heavy handed and the WoW handles it better, atleast in the lore. In game it mostly works out to; if its red it will attack you on sight and you cannot interact with it in any way other than killing it and if its green you can never hope to attack it or even oppose / question it to a greater extent than halting your progress in the storyline by refusing its quest.

Not sure what this has to do with the statement that you quoted though, unless you are trying to say that because Warcraft didnt keep EVERYTHING from earlier D&D that the inspiration for those things that it did keep are now in question.